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Apple, Burst Reach Settlement
An anonymous reader writes "In 2005, Microsoft settled Burst's lawsuit for infringements on media player patents for $60 million. Many thought that Apple would be a ripe target next. However, Apple successfully voided 14 out of 36 Burst.com's patent claims in their iPod lawsuit. Apple would have gone after the remaining 22 claims. Today, Market Wire announced that the case was settled out of court: "Apple agreed to pay Burst a one-time payment of $10 million cash in exchange for a non-exclusive license to Burst's patent portfolio, not including one issued U.S. patent and 3 pending U.S. patent applications related to new DVR technology. Burst agreed not to sue Apple for any future infringement of the DVR patent and any patents that might issue from the pending DVR-related applications." The big winner would be the lawyers who reduced the settlement to approximately $4.6 million."
... everytime a company settles like this.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
"The big winner would be the lawyers whose fees reduced the settlement to approximately $4.6 million."
There. Fixed that up a bit.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
GPL says nothing about making something similar.
When the GPL on WordPress gets used to shut down Blogger.com and MovableType, then we'll talk.
Really??? are you trolling or do you not understand the purpose of GPLv3? Are you being willfully ignorant? GPLv3 is all about preventing this sort of behavior. It is trying to bring about change by working with in the existing framework (one that the authors of GPLv3 dislike). Turning the existing IP laws against themselves. I'd hardly call that hypocritical, some would call it poetic.
If you think the GPL (any version) is "extremely restrictive" then you haven't read many software licenses.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Not in this case. Burst is not a patent troll, they developed the IP in question, but outfits like Apple, MS, et all helped themselves to it, thinking they were too big for a little company like Burst to take on. I'm dissapointed Burst accepted the settlement: they had an open-and-shut case.
It's funny how
There's nothing odd about it.
When I attach the GPLv3 to code that I have written and you don't like the GPLv3, you're no worse off than if I had never existed. (Furthermore, even though you may not like the GPLv3, but it still is a lot less restrictive than just about any commercial license for copyrighted materials.)
When Burst takes out bogus patents on digital video transmission, everybody is worse off because Bust can now prevent other people from doing things.
but when MegaCorp or someone else who owns IP tries to enforce terms of ownership, it's an evil bad thing...
There is nothing evil about enforcing legitimate property rights; quite to the contrary.
What is evil is that these companies obtained these "rights" in the first place due to a breakdown of the patent system.
About a million...
Hint: proprietary software have licenses too.
How we know is more important than what we know.
To Apple, Burst now represents an additional barrier to entry into the same market. It won't make a difference necessarily to a large company, but a small potentially more innovative competitor will now have to pay off Burst before using similar features. It seems that Apple's lawyers could have taken out all of the patents, given how successful they were with the 14 they invalidated. They took out just enough to reduce their liability, paid Burst a token sum, and then left Burst enough ammo to challenge others--ultimately to Apple's benefit.
They've done this before. This doesn't seem that different from their settlement with Creative over hierarchical lists for sorting music.
If I was Ballmer, I'd be throwing chairs at my incompetent attorneys. They wasted over $50 million by not picking apart Burst's patents and settling for way too much money.