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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.
because I'd be a bajillionaire.
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
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
It is a little ironic to look at how Microsoft initially started the litigation spree for Burst by settling for $60M which makes a litigation warchest for Burst to pursue Microsoft's major competitors in multimedia distribution, i.e. Apple Computer & Akamai.
It's kinda like how Microsoft initially bought a license from SCO several years ago, and then watched as SCO attempted to IP-attack the Linux community, again a upstart competetitor for Microsoft for Server Operating systems.
Is there a pattern emerging here, where Microsoft throws in the towel against a lowly firm IP software patents, which indirectly supports Microsoft's ultimate goals. The old adage: The enemy of my enemy is my friend!
I went and read some of their docs and went through their technology presentation. What their incredible solutions is: redundant server setup with a separate distributor server that "tells" the client software which of the servers is least loaded, and buffering of video (or what they call it is faster-than-realtime "bursting" and "caching"). That's it.
They have their right to offer their products on the market, but there's totally nothing worthy of patenting and licensing there, so no wonder both Microsoft and Apple turned them down.
This is the sad story of a company with an actual product that turned into a patent troll, simply since being a patent troll pays better.
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
This is a good thing: Every time some little company pisses off some big player like Microsoft, IBM or Apple with some inane patent thing, it pushes the big companies (and their army of Washington lobbyists) one step closer to realizing just how screwed up the American patent system is. Of course it would help if the people in Congress had a clue, but every little bit helps.
The way I see it is that there are currently just too many patentables in computer software. Some reform is needed, such as not allowing companies to patent "operation X, which is old, *applied to* market Y which is new" type patents, which are the real stupid ones. However, the majority of annoying patents like this will go away, because such a mass of prior art will exist, that you can be pretty much guaranteed that someone will have done something like it before unless it is truly inventive. That's not to say that bad patents won't be granted, but it will become pretty easy to get lawsuits like this dismissed with a little research.
Does anyone else see this optimistic view of the future? Am I just naive?
In some ways, the lawsuit against Microsoft exonerates Apple. The reason Burst won it's lawsuit against MS was because they had engaged in negotiations with MS and revealed their technology secrets to MS. And because MS's subsequent behaviour convinced the jury MS had negiotated in bad faith as a means of stealing the IP.
I think we can be pretty sure that 1) MS would not have shared this with APPLE. 2) the MS was doing this to gain a competative advantage in streaming over the fairly well established quicktime standard at the time.
Thus if Apple copied Burst technology it was at a very high conceptual level, because they woul dnot have had access to the methods like MS did. And arguably, what made Bursts techinology valuable at the time was as a response to Apple's prior art, not because it was such a world-beating technology. That is, if quicktime had not existied MS would not have felt pressured to acquire Busts technology with any alacrity but woul dhave just developed their own.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I worked for a consulting company that helped write their first patents and developed their demos. I wrote one of the first versions of their streaming video server back in 1997 and the patents were submitted before that by my employer. Remember folks, this was way - way back before anyone was even thinking about streaming video or music over the internet, as a matter of fact, back then, you had special video hardware to do the mpeg decoding. In 97 it was impressive to be able to stream multiple video streams on a LAN. I think we had 10 clients streaming full video from our server over 10baseT. Ah, the good ole days of startups.
And you really think that if it's these huge corporations that finally push for patent reform it will be a kind of reform that puts the small inventor on equal footing with them? Everytime this sort of patent suit comes up someone posts "Oh goody, when the big players feel the sting they will change the system!" This is kind of a circular defeatist argument. You admit that the status quo won't change until the big companies that in reality hold the power push for change, but at the same time think that change will benefit anyone other than those big companies? The attitude needs to be that the patent system is broken, we ALL are feeling it and WE THE PEOPLE whom it is supposed to serve, not "we the corporations" need to revise it to work for everyone.
And more than anything else what the patent system needs is a way to successfully use it without having to spend thousands to millions of dollars on third party consulatations and lawyers. Forget all the actual lawsuits you're seeing, those come after a patent is granted; the fact is just to apply for and receive a patent you practically have to feed a family of lawyers. What a joke. I don't need a personal attorney with me at the RMV to successfully apply for a new drivers license, why should I need to do the same just to use the patent system with any chance of success up front?
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --