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Burst.com Sues Apple Over Patent Infringement

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the never-saw-it-coming dept.

AWhiteFlame writes "Techdirt is reporting that Burst.com has filed a lawsuit against Apple for Patent Infringement. From the article, 'Burst.com is known for having patented a method for moving large pieces of content online at faster speeds [...] Last year, they approached Apple, suggesting that the company pay it 2% of iTunes' revenue. Apple then went on the offensive in January, proactively asking a judge to either invalidate Burst's patents or declare that Apple wasn't infringing. Just to make the litigation circle complete, after a few months of trying to reach a middle settlement ground, Burst has now gone ahead and sued Apple on its own.'"

6 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Apple should just give it to them by Foerstner · · Score: 2, Informative

    Apple's been making a "small profit" on the iTunes music store for quite some time now. It comes up at every quarterly conference call, and the answer has been the same since about 2004.

    --
    The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
  2. Google:Detroit "tax break" EDS/OnStar/Saab by NZheretic · · Score: 2, Informative
    Google Detroit "tax break" EDS
    Google Detroit "tax break" OnStar
    Google Detroit "tax break" Saab

    Detroit's financial woes.

  3. Re:summary by Gorshkov · · Score: 4, Informative

    Problem is, Burst did it years BEFORE Quicktime, Akaimi or anyone else. What is obvious now wasn't back then. Do your research. Look at the filing dates of those patents.

    Do YOUR research.
    Resuming downloads? FTP
    Load Balancing? Pretty well any large-scale internet router, database management system, web server, or any of a large number of system software packages, and most modern operating system network subsystems.
    Play while spooling? Not a whole hellova lot different from double-buffering, except you're writing it to disk instead of an in-memory structure.

    How a patent like that got granted in the first place is absolutly beyond me. If I can come up with reasonable (thought not necessarily *legally* acceptable) examples like that off the top of my head at 7AM after having been up all night WITHOUT doing any research, you're gonna have a very hard time convincing me that the patents should have been granted in the first place.

  4. Re:summary by John+Straffin · · Score: 2, Informative

    Once upon a time, just about everything we see as being "obvious" today wasn't obvious at all, except to one person. Why shouldn't that one person, if they also had the foresight to patent their idea, be rewarded?

    --
    My contempt for the behavior and beliefs of the two major political parties cannot be adequately expressed in 120 chara
  5. Re:summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    That's not a patent or a copyright thing. It's a trademark thing.

  6. Re:Burst Vs Microsoft?! by sh00z · · Score: 2, Informative
    Wow you sure know your history better than I do. I had NO idea that Apple System 6 had a HTML based Widget technology on the desktop... Especially since HTML didn't exist for 4 years after System 6 was released. So tell me, when did Apple start predicting the future and innovating based on things that didn't exist yet?
    I rather think he does know his history better than you do. Hypertext (the 'H' in HTML) was inspired by Apple's Hypercard software. Tim Berners Lee's innovation, of course, was to place everything out on the Internet. So, yes, System 6 had the equivalent of HTML-based widgets on the desktop. I was using Hypercard in 1987 to animate Excel charts.