Patent Troll With Good Record in Past Sues Netflix, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Others Over Offline Downloads (arstechnica.com)

Netflix added the ability to download movies and TV episodes for offline viewing in November last year. Music streaming service SoundCloud, and video hosting service Vimeo have had this feature for quite some time, too. But they are all being sued now by a patent troll. From an ArsTechnica report: The plaintiff is a company few have heard of: Blackbird Technologies, a company with no products or assets other than patents. Blackbird's business is to buy up patent rights and file lawsuits over them, a business known colloquially as "patent trolling." Last week, Blackbird (who tells potential clients about being "able to litigate at reduced costs and achieve results") filed lawsuits against Netflix, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Starz, Mubi, and Studio 3 Partners, which owns the Epix TV channel. [...] The patent-holding company, which filed the lawsuits in Delaware federal court, has good reason to hope for success. The '362 patent already has a track record of squeezing settlement cash out of big companies.

Comments

Automated CD-R Duplication patent?

[Whatanut]

Seems odd skimming the patent to apply this to offline video caching. It seems fairly specific to a method of automating the process of ordering, duplicating and shipping CD media. There is some ambiguous text in there about "digital media". But it also has claims such as:

4. The method of claim 1, wherein said first module is configured to send at least one signal to at least one printing device to create mailing address labels for each of said requests.

Which, I'm sure netflix is not doing. Seems like an attempt to broadly use a patent that's not really related to the actual process being used.

Shocking...

WTH is a Pattent Troll with a Good Record?

[Anonymous Coward]

gtfo of here with that