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Adam Carolla Settles With Podcasting Patent Troll
Personal Audio has been trying to assert patents they claim cover podcasting for some time now; in March Adam Carolla was sued and decided to fight back. Via the EFF comes news that he has settled with Personal Audio, and the outcome is likely beneficial to those still fighting the trolls. From the article: Although the settlement is confidential, we can guess the terms. This is because Personal Audio sent out a press release last month saying it was willing to walk away from its suit with Carolla. So we can assume that Carolla did not pay Personal Audio a penny. We can also assume that, in exchange, Carolla has given up the opportunity to challenge the patent and the chance to get his attorney’s fees. ... EFF’s own challenge to Personal Audio’s patent is on a separate track and will continue ... with a ruling likely by April 2015. ... We hope that Personal Audio’s public statements on this issue mean that it has truly abandoned threatening and suing podcasters. Though a press release might not be legally binding, the company will have a hard time justifying any further litigation (or threats of litigation) against podcasters. Any future targets can point to this statement. Carolla deserves recognition for getting this result.
Lodsys, of "in-app purchases" infamy, have been very quiet of late.
Is the tide finally turning in the favour of innovation and common sense?
He should have pushed for court and had a judge rule then it would have murdered the whole thing and sent a clear message to all the other patent trolls.
Now the trolls have the ability to come back later, picking a poor podcaster that can not fight back.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The big corps would now have us believe that a special breed of troll called a "patent troll" is the only problem with the system, and they, like every entrepreneur, are merely victims. This is all just the same manipulative BS. The patent troll exists only because the patent system is broken. Fix the problem at its root and patent trolls will be irrelevant.
He should, but he couldn't. Apparently he had already spent more than the $500.000 he had crowdfunded to fight the troll. Not everyone can afford justice.
So you ask for more, I donated $100 to his cause and would have thrown in another $100, Also get other big hitter podcasters to spread the word. Adam is big, but not Leo Laporte and TWIT big. He could have reached out and really churned the media on this.
Honestly these patent trolls need to be met with a legal nuclear bomb. You dont end on a peace agreement, you turn their world into a nuclear wasteland.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It would have been great for him to invalidate their patent. I can however see where the economics of it might not work. Especially considering that the trial was occurring in a venue considered friendly to trolls. It sounds like he, and his legal team, made a calculation and figured that they were going to spend a lot more money with no certainty that the court would do the right thing. Also with no certainty that they would be able to recover any of their non-trivial legal fees. I can see where he would decide it was time to cut his losses. The silver lining here is that if he spent over $500,000 odds are they ended up spending something similar. So this whole endeavor has likely been a big money loser for them.
Personal Audio has been trying to assert patents they claim cover podcasting
This is completely false. The patents don't cover podcasting per se, rather they cover methods for displaying and indexing podcast directories for distribution, the way they are organized in, for instance, the iTunes store. You can podcast all you want, distribute your podcasts and do everything else with them without Personal Audio making a claim, unless you put them into an iTunes store-like directory.
Not saying that it's a whole lot better, but this patent is easily avoidable, and the description is just disinformation.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The reason I say it is a silver lining is that the money Adam Carolla lost is mostly crowd funded money. So a lot of people lost $20 each. The trolls didn't bankrupt him, it appears that they didn't succeed in forcing him to pay and they very likely lost ~$500,000 out of pocket. So for the trolls this is a net loss. Depriving them of funds, generating publicity for the cause and having them fail at their goals are all good things. Not as good as winning an outright victory but better than losing to them.
Lawyers as a general rule are loath to see anything that generates legal activity go away. No matter how abusive of the system it is. Just look at how much money lawyers spend defeating any measure that might be construed as tort reform. Still at the end of the day when a lawyer is being paid, assuming the lawyer isn't a crook, they generally act in their client's interests or at least within the confines of the client's instructions. From the point of view of the individual lawyers involved the very best thing that could happen is this case drags on for years and they get to bill a lot more hours. A case like this is a gravy train for lawyers and now it is ending.
Better to call it a webcast, i.e. episodic publication of audio files on the Internet.
Podcast is just Apples branding of the webcast for its iPod, and it came later.
This patent troll claimed *podcasts* infringed on its patent, as they came later ,
This is all completely wrong. First, Personal Audio is not technically "troll" - it didn't buy patents to troll, it actually developed the (somewhat obvious) technologies. Paul Logan is a real inventor that has brought real products to market.
Second, there is no patent for "podcasting" at all. The Personal Audio patents are about distribution and organizing of episodic content. Yes, they had a real product that did that, until Apple incorporated the same techniques into iTunes.
Paul Logan's Slashdot interview might be a little instructive for those that have only heard Adam Corolla's inflammatory fundraising scheme.
Logan: Well, I could answer this question by arguing that I did try to build a product. That I spent $1.6 million of my own money trying to realize our vision of a custom listening experience that ended up, at the end of the day, being implemented in the form of a cassette tape product, and not the digital player system we envisioned and patented.
When I left MicroTouch to start Personal Audio in 1996, we employed 500 people making touch screens in Massachusetts. Without those patents, we would never have gotten the company off the ground.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
There are still some gems out there. You should check out Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak's No Agenda Show.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
It's because we don't need tort reform, our system is pretty good. The vast majority of reasons people use for tort reform were made up by the insurance companies.
You clearly don't know any lawyers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I looked on the company's website, and it appears to list no royalty schedule, unlike MPEG LA and MP3Licensing (Fraunhofer/Technicolor).
It sounds to me as if he's pulling a switch in the middle of his argument. He didn't spend $1.6 million on the "episodic content" part. He spent the money on the playing device, which may have been noble and good, but he got his lunch eaten. (Not even by Apple. If it was a "cassette tape product", then it wasn't wireless and had less space than a Nomad.)
I'm sorry his product failed, but it seems like a reach to claim priority on the obvious parts of it. And I have even less sympathy when he's dragging in unrelated expenses to try to justify it.