Adam Carolla Settles With Podcasting Patent Troll 63
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 has been very quiet of late (Score:2)
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?
Re: Lodsys has been very quiet of late (Score:5, Insightful)
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Whenever patent trolls get talked about, it always comes down to how much impact this is having on small businesses and entrepreneurs.
I think the patent trolls naturally tell us that this is "no big deal".
However, I can't shake the feeling that utterly abysmal rate of new small businesses being started these days is directly related to these fucking evil trolls.
I think any estimation of how much economic activity is being stifled by these trolls is quite possibly orders of magnitude off.
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> Unless by innovative you mean dumbing down the user interface even more to appeal to the least common denominator. If so, then there's craploads of innovation.
Oh you mean like Tim Berners-Lee did when he simplified human interaction with shared data on the fledgling internet which had, until then, been useable only by CS academics and a few industrial techs?
Give me craps loads more my friend...
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I am still missing my Groklaw fix which used to assiduously track and report on such cases with detailed insight.
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Luckily nobody patented whining and hand wringing over the internet, otherwise Slashdot will get sued.
Dammit! Adam you rolled over... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Dammit! Adam you rolled over... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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In, what, like 2006 or something. It's been a while now.
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They are not Nielson, but they are a significant (if not perfectly distributed) sample of podcast listeners, and one of very few centralized sources of data on the subject.
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Adam has been asking for more money every day for months...every episode of every show on the Carolla Digital network
Ah, there's the problem. Many of his biggest supporters in this effort have no interest in his shows at all.
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Adam Corolla has a whole podcast network, and that is bigger then TWIT and Leo.
The problem with Patent troll is that anyone who has a claim is now called a troll.
When you create a nuclear wasteland, it's everyone's world suffers.
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He is a businessman, not a saint.
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Well, he "settled". I can't provide a direct quote, though it sure seemed like he said previously he'd never settle.
I'm glad at least that there isn't a permanent gag order, and Adam will give the details in not too long a time.
BTW, I am not saying I'm necessarily 100% on his side. There was either a Planet Money or Freakanomics podcast episode about Personal Audio, and, after listening to that, I do think they had something very close to "a podcast with cassettes".. As much as people disclaim patents of
Re:Dammit! Adam you rolled over... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The silver lining here is that if he spent over $500,000 odds are they ended up spending something similar.
It's quite difficult to consider spending half a million dollars on legal fees only to walk away without justice being served as being a silver lining. This is one more reason people should support the EFF - they see their cases through to the end whenever possible (AFAICT). The best outcome in this case for the lawyers involved is exactly what happened - loads of fees and no actual case; what motivation do they (in general) have to see patent trolls go away?
Re:Dammit! Adam you rolled over... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Dammit! Adam you rolled over... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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He should have pushed for court
How much did you contribute to his crowdfunding campaign to help cover the million-dollar cost of going to court?
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>He should have ... had a judge ... murdered ... and sent a clear message to all the other patent trolls.
You're now on a watchlist.
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With the litigant (Personal Audio) having chosen to file in the Texas court system that historically favors the patent holders, Carolla's legal team probably advised him to take the deal, walk away without payment, secure future immunity and call it a victory.
It is unlikely that Personal Audio will file against other podcasters - even large ones, like Maron, Rogan, Nerdist, Ira Glass, LaPorte, et. al because the litigant discovered during filing that podcasters aren't making huge buckets of money. The la
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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 inter [personalaudio.net]
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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 un
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I would mod you up against the storm of patent-hating middle-aged techies here if I had points. Unfortunately any post suggesting patents are good will get modded into oblivion.
The real issue is the plight of the middle income person trying to fight the corporation. Even if the patent is totally off base, we just can't afford it.
Patent trolls provide a valuable service (Score:5, Insightful)
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The patent troll exists only because the patent system exists... You can't fix what is "broken" by design. It's time for complete utter abolition. And copyright too! Pure corruption, all of it...
To each his own (Score:2)
My favorite Bill Burr webcasts are when it is just him. Yes, he jams in two big bunches of ads, but a few clicks is all it takes to skip them.
I think the point is that things change. TV channels change (usually getting worse). Podcasts change, usually by adding disruptive ads. The solution is always the same -- branch out, trying something new.
My podcast [just-think-it.com], has no ads & no guests, runs about 75 minu
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But what is that you're doing with the names? Is that numerology? Seriously?
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I skip prerecorded ads (e.g. beginning, end of Carolla's podcast.. sometimes in the middle). I listen to live reads, for those kinds of mistakes or just riffing..
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There are still some gems out there. You should check out Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak's No Agenda Show [noagendashow.com].
Not "Podcasting" (Score:3)
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.
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The patent is also invalid and should never have been granted. The only way to get rid of it is to challenge the validity in court. A settlement means he's not going to do that and the patent stands. It doesn't matter that it's easily avoidable, it's not something that should have been patented in the first place.
At what royalty? (Score:3)
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I looked on the company's website, and it appears to list no royalty schedule, unlike MPEG LA and MP3Licensing (Fraunhofer/Technicolor).
Well those guys are involved in "standard" organizations, so their patents have to have a schedule so they qualify as RAND patents.
So much for fighting (Score:2)
eh, Corolla?