Apple, Burst Reach Settlement 74
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."
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh boy... I dealt with these guys before... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.