Internet video patents

i'm curious about this myself. regardless:

(1) i've received nothing yet (which seems pretty odd).
(2) i will not roll over on this if they do. no way.

good question...

I don't know for sure, but my understanding is that patent rights in the United States (much like trademark and copyright) extend to other countries ... mostly because of international treaties ...

So I'm not sure that even a server in another country, much less living in another country not on their lists, would help ...

I haven't heard of anyone in the adult industry paying.

But from what I understand (and this is strictly unsubstantiated rumor) ...

Their goal is to scare about 10 percent of the webmasters into paying ... and even if that small amount pays ... they're making money.

I've also heard that they have never won a lawsuit ... their success is mostly based upon scare tactics, not a real legal case.

I'd argue it would be a significant mistake for anyone to sign anything admitting infringment, much less allowing them near your accounting. Period. You may think that "cooperating" buys you peace of mind or is cheaper, but that's how they'll get their hooks in. They will then know that:

1) you respond financially to vague threats of legal action;

2) you are unlikely to cost them money by forcing them to assign attorney time to actually build and litigate a case;

3) you can safely go on the list of people to threaten again in about a year.

It'll be interesting to see how far this horseshit flies.

Their most recent lawsuit ended in a summary judgement for the defendants. It was the V-chip suit with the TV makers.

IMO the amounts that they are asking for make payment out of the question. Had they comes with a fee of a few hundred to a few thousand depending on company size they would have had a greater likelihood of success. It would have been like the VISA fee, very annoying but in the end a cost of doing business.

In the PANIP patent case, the first wave of defendants saw their settlement offers drop dramatically when they filed their first motions. Perhaps this will be a similar result, where Acacia will serve a select group, and then try to settle before litigation heats up. At some point if you are a named defendant there will be a threshold of pain that the plaintiff lawyers will be seeking to ascertain.

We are fortunate to have two in house attorneys for our company, so the litigation blow would be lessened should they target us, but for a smaller company they would likely be in a difficult situation where paying a few thousand to make this go away is the best choice.

I know one thing for a fact, Acacia will not likely see six figure royalty checks coming in the door before Dec 31st, they will have a fight from the larger program owners. Maybe they believe our industry is not well funded to withstand a protracted litigation. I just know a few hundred thousand royalty fee would seem to better spent retaining Holland and Knight for a 600 or so hours of work.

I just received their patent presentation package. Very impressive in the way they have the material presented. However, I've noticed 2 things about this. So far, they seem to only be targeting the adult market... and only sites they "think" will not have the resources to defend themselves if they choose not to respond to this royalty demand. So far, I haven't heard any representative of the larger programs confirm that they have received this notice as well, so I'll assume for now that they haven't.

Also, the invocation of these patent royalties seems to breach anti-trust laws and will probably get busted up by anti-trust lawyers after they try this same strong-arm tactics on some large mainstream industries. These guys received their latest patents only in July of this year, yet they're setting a deadline of Dec. 31st for people to start paying the royalties on these questionable patents or face legal recourse. Smells a bit like borderline blackmail to me. (Just my opinion). Seems like there are gaping holes in their case that someone could exploit if they chose to.

I'd like to hear what the larger companies are saying about this (if they even know yet).

For those that decide to not pay by the Dec. 31st deadline...

what do you think would be the worst case scenario and the best case scenario?

Jade

Jade, the scenerios would be rather obvious. Best case, nothing becomes of it and you continue on with biz as usual. Worst case, they wait a few months to tally up the contacts that they sent packages out to and follow up with patent infringement lawsuits (the validity of which would still be questionable considering patents of this broad nature never really have a good trackrecord for the plantiffs in court).

Considering there are quite possibly MILLIONS of websites serving video downloads or feeds, a patent of this kind is by nature obsurd, and impossible to fully enforce. Consider all of the "regular joes" who have videos on their home computer which are accessed by other regular joes through P2P platforms like KaZaa and Limewire. Thousands upon thousands of video clips are exchanged electronically over the net this way. Yet Acacia seems to want to primarily target adult websites as their guinnea pigs in this monopolization. The whole thing smells sour from start to finish.

I'm not paying and I'll fight them in court even if it costs me 10 times what their royalty payments are. I'm not opening up my financials for ANY company. They are just trying to extort money from the adult industry. They are targeting the smaller sites to build up a good track record and then they are gonna go after the bigger sites. They have no real reason to go after smaller sites because even if they do win, chances are they won't collect how much money they spent on the litigation.

All I can say to Acacia is...

GoFuckYourself

If you receive one of these letters, I suggest that you do not ignore it! You should seek the advice of an attorney. It is true that a common tactic in situations such as this is to go after a bunch of little guys to develop a track-record and see what the likely defenses are to the claim before going after the big guys.

Only time will tell if the patent is enforceable. Also, you will want an attorney to evaluate the scope of the patents they are claiming have been infringed and compare that to what you do. It may be that your method of providing video is not a method within the scope of the patent.

We got our letter today. I was starting to feel left out...

Pretty fancy packaging too. Must have cost them a pretty penny.

Can some of the folks who posted here over the last couple of days (I think it was the homegrowncontent.com guy and one other) please give some sort of update as to what's happening with your coalition effort?

And has anyone who received the 'packet kit' contacted their content providers, to suss out what is going on from their end?

Has anyone actually taken the 'kit' to their lawyer? What was their response?

Sorry to activate this thread again, but it seems important to follow this thing through -- and have as much info as possible.

Someone should make a website to keep everyone updated on this.

I suggest www.fight-acacia.com or www.acaciasucks.com

Go register it and set it up with the ongoing happenings of this drama.

Here's a letter I got from Holio.net on this matter last week:

"It has come to our attention that a company known as Acacia Media has targeted our industry for patent infringement lawsuits based on a claim they have a patent on all video transmission which is user controlled. This type of intimidating litigation has become a new fad aimed at small internet businesses. (see youmaybenext.com) We are proposing to fight this practice with a unified defense using the same lawyers and experts. Holio's attorney Saul Reiss will attempt to coordinate this effort on behalf of anyone who is faced with threats and or litigation from Acacia. If you receive any such claim, please contact him at 310-360-8840. If you already have a lawyer handling this case, please have your attorney contact Mr. Reiss.

Holio.net "

I've got this package...
Shit!
Visa stole just $750 but Acacia try to get $1,500 - $170,000 from EACH webmaster!

It seems VideoSecrets and 10 others are still in litigation with Acacia. There were initially 39 defendants, 29 settled with Acacia. The article I got this information from is located:

http://www.avnonline.com/issues/2003...051403_3.shtml


Good luck guys.. We?re all in this together.