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Burst.com Sues Apple Over Patent Infringement
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.'"
1) vanilla load balancing
2) automatically resuming a download
3) playing a download while the entire file is saved to disk (regardless of how much is actually viewed?)
4) caching downloads (and/or partial downloads) on disk instead of asking the server again
I can't bring myself to actually read the patents since my Patentlawyerese-to-English translator is broken but they have a list of them here (pdf).
So some speculator pooled together the [cough]bullshit[/cough] IP of several defunct startups and hopes to sue everybody.
For whatever it's worth, back in January Cringely wrote that Burst does have something worthwhile:
The reason Apple changed its MacWorld announcements at the last minute was because the company sued little Burst.com a few days before, trying to invalidate the Burst patents. But since Apple sued Burst, Burst shares have gone UP by 30 percent. The market is rarely wrong. Suing Burst was an enormous mistake for Apple, casting a pall on their video strategy and potentially costing the company strategic alliances with networks and movie studios. Apple realizes this now and is struggling internally to find a way to change course and put a positive spin on the course correction. Apple will lose and Burst will win, and Apple won't be able to afford to wait for the courts to decide anything, since time is critical in staking out Internet video turf. I predict that Apple will eventually take a license from Burst, that is UNLESS SOME OTHER COMPANY (Google? Real? Yahoo?) doesn't snatch up Burst first.
Here's something I've noticed lately: Big companies believe in patents as long as they are talking about THEIR patents. Because Burst is three guys in an office in Santa Rosa, companies like Microsoft and Apple tend not to take them seriously. They forget that Burst spent 21 years and $66 million developing that IP, and the company has code that is still better than anything else on the market -- code not even Microsoft has seen. Unless someone buys the company first, Burst is going to win this and eventually license the world. They are in the right, for one thing, and in practical terms they now have as much money for legal bills as any of their opponents. Apple can't win this one.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
"Hot/profitable product = Lawsuit. That is American way of sharing the pie."
From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to litigate.
It seems like Microsoft looks at a little company that DOES have some chance of winning a case, and rather than fighting it and letting some court assign a big fat award to them, just pays them off early on, when $60M seems like a big number. Burst can't sue Microsoft again, but since so much of the industry is built off of borrowed technology and ideas, they have just as valid a claim against Apple - which has a much bigger stake in the market - and is much less willing to settle. Take them to court, let the judge think that "Apple has profited illegally off of their IP" and get a big fat settlement. But where to pay for such a long, drawn-out lawsuit? Microsoft's early-on pittance.
I don't think Microsoft is nefariously "funding" the IP vultures, I think they just realized that they could get away a lot cheaper by settling early on and not having to deal with it. Most people never even heard about the MS v. Burst - but you can bet Burst will whip up a shitstorm about Apple stealing their IP and thus owing the success and health of their company's only profitable sector to Burst's crackpot IP. Apple will look bad, shares will suffer, and then Apple will settle...for more than the 2% Burst originally asked...to make it all go away.
Has anyone patented "Pulling an NTP" yet? I mean, prior art and nontriviality no longer seem to determine patentability, so someone out there with the time and money to exploit the patent system should.
And for people without the need for tinfoil hats, Microsoft has the kind of money it is easier to just pay off the trolls and not have to worry about any legality or further troll attempts...
Apple should have done the same...
If you look at MS's patent practices, they didn't started pushing through a ton of their work for patents until the last few years, after they started getting sued for crap that they had been using or even created years ago.
Hell, they left FAT wide open for 20 years, and FAT32 wide open for 10 years. So the little guys start sticking to the big companies and MS says, wait, we aren't going to just let our technology sit out there and let some other company try to use a patent to take it from us.
Funny though, you see Apple suing companies more than Microsoft over stupid little crap all the time, and Apple has ripped off a lot of companies along the way, heck Win98 Active Desktop/Konfabulator anyone?
Any of these companes that litigate over CRAP for small CRAP gains needs to be boycotted.
MS's patents so far have been defensive, Apple's patents so far have been used for both defense and offense, making them part of the slime corporations.
If MS starts suing over their patents instead only using them to defend themselves, they will also go on my list of scum sucking corporations.
I think there is a place for patents, but in the US we have a patent system that is outdated and ran by NON technical people, so just wording a technology with clever words gets a new patent, even though it has been in use for 20 years. This is so wrong.
There needs to be a larger threshold for patents and software technology, like specific code. There also needs to be reform about in use technologies that 'bleed' into to or existing patents.
Look at GIF 10 years ago, not only was it a bit silly, but the market impact could have been devastating. If you have a patent and allow the market to use it for a certain amount of time without ONCE protecting it before it because a standard, then you should lose your freaking patent. PERIOD.
Ok, as I said there is a place for patents, but the bar for truly innovation needs to be higher. Inventing a way to do something that truly was never done before is worthy, inventing a variation of something that is obvious to the technical minded and has been used by others for years in various ways is not.
People were downloading, and resuming downloads 30 years ago, yet we see another patent saying this company invented it. WTF.
But I still don't blame MS for just paying off the little trolls, when it could not only be more money to litigate, but with the bad press they are already battling, somethings are just easier to go away and not have to worry about...
Besides this type of Money to Microsoft is like me spending $45 to get my oil is changed. It isn't that I can't change it myself, just not worth my time...
It may seem like Burst.com is simply another NTP or patent troll, but I don't think that's really true. They actually did have a product but were driven out of the market by MS and WMP
And while their technologies may seem obvious now, they may not have been so obvious when they patented them. In fact, during the tech bubble, many though Burst would be another hot company. In fact, they argue that they were driven out of business because windows media player purposely was built to be incompatible with their technology (this is second hand information not verified by me.)
I'm not sure if Burst.com actually deserves to have these patents or win these lawsuits, but it definitely seems more justified than NTP in suing MS and now Apple
The USA will fall behind because ever more intellectual property will be locked up behind a multitude of corporations and individuals effectively ruled by lawyers who are more interested in earning legal fees rather than bothering to actually manufacture anything.
Other Governments and Europe's bureaucracies will not hesitate to forcibly acquire the necessary intellectual property needed get things done for large projects
Other countries and even Europe's parliament will also not hesitate to adopt more liberal intellectual property structures if you demonstrate that doing so will better benefit their economies as a whole, instead of just a few major corporations.
The USA administration and even more myopic major corporations will continue to let more and more manufacturing, service industry and development to be off-shored resulting in importing permanent poverty into the USA.
You want to see the future of the USA? Visit the remnants of Detroit motor city works, Ye Mighty, and despair
I remember having an extensive conversation with the Burst folks at Comdex back in 1991. At the time, I was working at Philips, in the CDI development group, working on streaming video off CD's. During this conversation, I could tell that what they were doing was fundimentally different from what everyone else thought was the correct way to stream data. Reading about the case lately, I think they have a valid claim...