Acacia Climbing the Food Chain

superflex writes "CNet and others have articles today related to a story that appeared here a couple months ago regarding Acacia Media Technologies, who hold several U.S. and international patents that they claim give them exclusive rights to compressed digital media transmission technologies. The previous article, for the lazy among you, was an AskSlashdot about whether the askers' pr0n site should pay license fees to these guys. Seems that since then, they've moved on to some internet radio sites, and are actually getting fees out of them. Their claims haven't been challenged in court yet, but they appear very broad, possibly covering PPV on cable/satellite as well as internet-based streaming. One wonders if they might try going after one of the big boys soon."

Re:Doesn't cover radio, infrared,WiFi

[superflex]

Note that my submission states "internet radio", not radio in general. The CNet and Globe and Mail articles specifically cite RadioIO [radioio.com], who, as mentioned in the first paragraph of both articles received patent violation notification from Acacia this week.

Also note that the abstract of the patent claim isn't the important part. The claims are. Refer to claim #35, "35. A receiving system as recited in claim 25, wherein the transceiver means receives the information via any one of telephone, ISDN, broadband ISDN, satellite, common carrier, computer channels, cable television systems, MAN, and microwave."

The only one of those that seemed a bit dodgy is to me was "Common Carrier", which is defined here [bldrdoc.gov] for your convenience, courtesy of the U.S. Federal Govt, Federal Standard 1037C [bldrdoc.gov]. Interpreting that definition in its broadest terms, there are a hell of a lot of transmission media that could fall under the claims of this patent.

Re:You've got to be kidding ...

[BigDish]

Only problem with using CD's as prior art is it isn't. The PCM (Pulse-Code Modulated) audio used on CD's is NOT compressed. It is uncompressed, stereo, 16bit, 44,100 samples per second audio. When's this patent date to again? I think there was some compressed digital audio and video transmission long before that on satellite (think C and Ku band) in fact, I KNOW there was ANALOG (yes, there is such a thing as analog compression) compression of audio and video as early as the 80's. For the ultra simple compression, there was a Hotel PPV service that transmitted their signal over satellite on one transponder. Except they had 4 channels. How did they do it? They divided the screen into 4 quarters. Each quarter held one video signal. They then used a different subcarrier for each program's audio.