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Profiting From A Vague Patent HOWTO
tunabomber writes "IEEE Spectrum has an in-depth article about the rise of Acacia Research Corporation and its plan for enforcing its patent on 'Digital Media Technology' (which seems to lay claim to any technology that transmits audio or video digitally for entertainment purposes). You may recall that there was a story on Slashdot over a year ago about Acacia's threats and subsequent lawsuits against some small adult entertainment companies regarding their violation of the patent. There was also an Ask Slashdot posted a while back by the owner of one of these companies who had received a letter from Acacia Research demanding that they pay licensing fees. Both Slashdot stories asked how long it would be until Acacia went after the big media companies. Well, they finally did last week. It appears that Acacia just had to get enough companies (Disney and Virgin Radio, among others) to pay licensing fees before they could afford a legal adventure against the big guys. DirectTV, Comcast, Echostar, and Charter Communications are some of the defendents. Let the fireworks begin!"
IIRC, they were shot down pretty hard by the AMA or some other such organization when this was suggested. It was just a stunt to get publicity in their fight against malpractice suits. I've got to tell you though, there are two sides to this story. People like to be sympathetic with doctors, because there's an assumption they're helping people. They seem to assume all those 'injured' people who are the lawyers' clients must be faking it or gunning for money for something that wasn't the docs' fault. The fact is that sometimes the plaintiffs are scum, sometimes it's hard to tell who's scum, and sometimes, ofttimes, the doctors are committing some serious malpractice and deserve to have their hats handed to them. How important is debugging and peer review in software development? Think about that and then consider how often doctors make diagnoses and prescriptions without peer review. How often they leave things to immigrant nurses and don't check back until they've given the patient twice the amount of a drug they should have. This happened to my grandmother! My relative's mother was in a hospital and was mistreated and died. Clearly a preventable case, imho, but they just didn't have the processes they needed to handle people properly there. Until doctors stop bitching and start developing better processes and review mechanisms, I am all for the plaintiffs' lawyers.