Apple Sues Burst.com in iTunes Patent Dispute

An anonymous reader writes "Burst.com, a patent holder of many patents covering streaming video and time-shifting of video, has been sued by Apple after license negotiations broke down. Apple is asking the court to invalidate Burst.com's patents. Burst.com is the same company that successfully sued Microsoft over patent infringements. Many comparisons will likely be made of NTP and Burst.com, but Burst.com actually has useful technology, has owned the patents for over a decade, and most importantly, actually had highly regarded products that made use of the patents."

Comments

NTP does too

[feijai]

NTP's patent holders made actual products based on the products, and held them for over a decade as well. Burst is different in what regard again?

A Brief History of QuickTime...

[podperson]

QuickTime was released in 1991. I think developers saw betas in late 1990 but I could be wrong. They'd demoed QuickTime as an early alpha at least one year earlier (e.g. they'd shown digital videos playing back in MacWrite documents).

QuickTime 1.0 was followed in 1993 by 1.5 and 1.6 (which ran under Windows). By the time QuickTime 2.0 came out in 1994, you could embed quicktime videos inside a web page. QuickTime 3.0 allowed videos to start playing as soon as enough data had been downloaded, and you could stream ahead of the playback head (the way it works today). I believe QuickTime 3.0 also unified the file format (i.e. by eliminating "forked" QuickTime files where metadata was stored in the resource fork.)

Given that Burst was founded in 1990, that its flagship product is at 2.0 (I think Apple's opensourced Darwin Streaming Server is probably a more mature product), I doubt they have a leg to stand on.

It's ColorSync all over again.

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicktime

Re:A Brief History of QuickTime...

[hw2084]

Given that Burst was founded in 1990, that its flagship product is at 2.0 (I think Apple's opensourced Darwin Streaming Server is probably a more mature product), I doubt they have a leg to stand on.

Do a little bit of research first.

The Burst patents don't cover all video streaming in general. Burst came up with and patented the streaming+caching technology that allows smooth playback of video over the internet. Before Burst, everyone would just have you download the whole file before playing, or do straight streaming which led to hiccups during playback.

Before Burst was on the scene, video streaming was horrible because they couldn't figure out how to smooth out the slowdowns in traffic. After Burst demonstrated their technology (most famously for the U2 Popmart concert) *and* talked to Microsoft and Real about licensing their code, the next versions of their video players magically contained the same buffering technology. Apple was soon to follow, probably figuring "hey everyone else is doing it."

How do you prefer your crow

[way2trivial]

boiled- baked- fried?

http://www.burst.com/new/products/main.htm

My god, a two click search, and by your own admission for holding patents with NO intent of producing. (If they had a product we would all be hating on Apple) your entire well reasoned and well written argument falls apart.

Re:The patent system is ridiculous

[QuietLagoon]

I'm so tired of hearing about all these companies whose sole purpose is to hang onto patents and so-called intellectual property.

Burst is not one of those companies that collects patents for the purpose of suing alleged infringers.

Burst themselves had the foresight to develop their technology a number of years ago and patent their ideas. Check out their website and you will see that the "faster than realtime" technology that Burst developed is the only patents that they own.

Re:Burst beat Apple to Streaming/Buffering

[ajs]

I would suspect a couple (especially the last) of the entries in this paper to be decent prior-art sources for much of what is listed in the patent's claims, but perhaps not all.