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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."
Why not just develop stuff :(
Laws are evil.
... 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!
F1RST POST meeting in botswana?
So far, from my layman's perspective, my Tivo can pwn burst for some of its products. Ahh the business circle of lawsuits... or was it life. I'm not sure here.
The game.
It's funny how a lot of people here insist that extremely restrictive licenses like the GPLv3 are perfectly OK for software developer to attach to their Intellectual Property, but when MegaCorp or someone else who owns IP tries to enforce terms of ownership, it's an evil bad thing...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Guess what? Our government is itself a product of the market system. Cities like New York, London, and San Francisco are successful precisely *because* of their enormous governments--they compete for capital, talent, and prestige against cities with small, ineffectual governments that are unable to effectively lure and corral said capital, talent, and prestige. And as goes the city, so go city-states and nations: Somalia, being a libertarian paradise, is a rather unpleasant place to live for non-ideologues. Somalians, those who can, vote with their feet and leave.
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.
and dont feed trolls either please...
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.
Cue Bob Cringely on 1, 2, 3.....
it won't do anything but make you dick stink...
Back in 1998/9 when Burst thought they had a 'novel' idea, they were making the rounds pimping their wares (so to say) to all the large satellite broadband providers and anyone else in the video and content delivery industries.
They tried for an NDA, but the company I was at didn't believe in signing anything to preview some software from a bunch of nobodies. Their software was alpha quality at best, the so-called 'SDK' didn't exist (IIRC the one 'document' provided with the photocopy-labeled cdrom), and the components were nothing more than a simple windows server and client providing a delivery pipe. They also couldn't seem to grasp the fact that one-way satellite networks did not have a backchannel. Yes friends, you need to get your files to the other side with a unidirectional transport. You could compare this to someone giving you ftp.exe+ftpd.exe and telling you you should license them for P2P delivery.
I ended up tossing their stuff aside because after about a dozen emails attempting to educate people on the deficiencies of their system one just has to well.. give up. The only novel point was their 'instant on', but most datacasters like us already had this kind of technology, or didn't need it period. I will say that the demo was canned and only used a few codecs. So it was very hard to ascertain the level of bullshit in the client-server demo.
Regardless, I now find it extremely interesting that they are sueing people who signed NDAs with them and/or had talks with them. I am sure other companies had the same experience we did. What a bunch of douchebags.
You're a simple-minded, uncomprehending fool who is plagiarizing an earlier comment made by a sophist.
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.
Where the fuck would I be if I did not know this? God damn I am glad I looked here.
This is off topic, but is driving me crazy for a few months now. On my work machine, RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, running Firefox 2.0.0.7, I get this nice little control box for slashdot comment display, with a bunch of sliders to see more comments, or to see less comments. Clicking on the comment summaries also opens them up on the same page.
At home though (Gentoo, Firefox 2.0.0.8), I don't get this fancy control box, but instead get a bunch of drop downs for comment levels, and comments styles (threaded, nested, flat), etc. Clicking on a comment header also opens it on a new page. I am running
I really like that fancy control box, with sliders, and that the comments open on the same page. I was wondering if any one knew how to get that. I tried poking around various links, but no dice. Tried disabling FF extensions, still no dice.
You're looking for the checkbox labeled "I am willing to help test Slashdot's New Discussion System." just above the comments on the article page. It's off by default, but you apparently checked it at one point, on your work machine. Presumably at some point they'll make it the default, with perhaps a preference option to use the old system for those who prefer it.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Did Burst ever make use of their own IP to do anything useful? I think that is the true test of the troll, that you sit on progress and make people pay you for thinking up crock.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
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.
I can't really fault them for playing the system to its full extent; if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have.
And if someone else did, I'd fault them too.
You can't say "the system allows crooks to get away with this, so it's not the crooks' fault". The fact that something happens to be legal doesn't make it acceptable.
Whoah people. Burst didn't win this one by my reckoning. $10m is a tiny fraction of what they hoped to get by enforcing their patents across the 100 gazillion iPods that Apple is 'infringing' their patents with.
I'd call this:
Burst: Pay us $1bn dollars, or we'll take a license off every iPod that you ever sell.
Apple: FOAD. We'll send our lawyer hoards after your patents, dumbasses.
Burst: Pay us! Pay us now!
Apple: OK, how many more of your patents do you want us to wipe off the face of the earth?
Burst: erm, how about $10m?
Apple: Since that's less than our lawyers fees, ok. Don't EVER try that again.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore