Here is a nice little letter and excerpt of the phone call I had with these people.
ACACIA
MEDIA
Technologies
Corporation
Robert A. Berman
Sr. VP Business Development & General Counsel
Telephone (949) 480-8333 Fax: 480-8390
email
[email protected]
October 11, 2002
Dear
Acacia Media Technologies Corporation owns a portfolio of patents dating back to 1991 covering content delivery methods such as video on demand, audio on demand, and video streaming on the Internet. It has recently come to our attention that you are using products and selling services in connection with these delivery methods that utilize technology covered by our patents. Our patents include U.S. patent Nos. 5,132,992; 5,234,275; 5,550,863; 6,002,720; 6,144,702; and an open continuation.
Acacia develops technologies in the media field, and we have significant experience in licensing technologies and enforcing patents. We request that you immediately contact your patent lawyer and examine your current and future product and service offerings relative to this patent portfolio. Acacia is prepared to license these patents on reasonable terms to you, and we would like to schedule a meeting with you to discuss a license. I look foward to your prompt reply.
Thank you,
Sincerely,
Robert A. Berman
500 Newport Center Drive. 7th Floor, Newport Beach, CA 92660
(nothing below is a direct quote, and only from memory of my call today.)
Now Mr. Berman openingly spoke of how the patent purchases and other future purchases shall be enforced. He went into detail about enforcing and his legal ability to go after prior licensing fees. He stated his fees would be based on the profit of the company. His qoute was 1,500.00 per year for 100,000.00 or less.
He stated the letters were just getting sent out (apparently I was lucky and got one first), that he has several thousand webmasters, and content providers on his list, with more to be added.
He claimed he wasnt trying to put people out of business. Nor double dip, yet in the same breath he stated that he would be having the content providers pay a license, and the website operators pay a license. This not only covered the streaming of it, but general delivery over the internet. As in my case, allowing webmasters to download a ZIP file that contains a Real format video. Which in my case no one is being charged, and I am using real to encode, zip to compress, and standard transfer protocols to send (basic download).