Acacia which owns the patent in 20+ countries is seeking at a bare minimum $1,500.00 plus 2% of your gross income. The income is not based on just the video portion of your site or job either. If your website or your job uses video that in any way violates their patent they want 2% of everything. The $1,500.00 is based on how much money you earn per year. If you earn a sizable amount (to them over 10k) this fee goes up.
This dollar fee is a waiver for past infringement you have done from the date you settled dating back to 1991. Supposidly they are going to stop offering this waiver for past infringement in late November, 2003. After this date they will demand a gross percentage or a much higher fine.
Acacia is also demanding in the settlement 100% access to your books and accounts. They will be performing routine audits of your income on a regular basis. They also are demaning tracking abilities of video usage so that they can determine that you are not attempting to short change them in any way.
The other part is they are in effect double, and tripple dipping (and so on). They want the site owner to pay, the affiliates to pay, the people linking to videos to pay, and on and on. Which is also why they are demanding a complete list of everyone you or your company does business with.
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Even the Federal Government cannot have such free access to your private records.
How can they claim to have a right to something you did before anyone even knew they had a patent to it. Surely the law can't expect every individual to know about all the patents out there.
Sure the law says you can't claim ignorance to defend yourself, but that applies to Laws not Patents...
This dollar fee is a waiver for past infringement you have done from the date you settled dating back to 1991. Supposidly they are going to stop offering this waiver for past infringement in late November, 2003. After this date they will demand a gross percentage or a much higher fine.
Acacia is also demanding in the settlement 100% access to your books and accounts. They will be performing routine audits of your income on a regular basis. They also are demaning tracking abilities of video usage so that they can determine that you are not attempting to short change them in any way.
The other part is they are in effect double, and tripple dipping (and so on). They want the site owner to pay, the affiliates to pay, the people linking to videos to pay, and on and on. Which is also why they are demanding a complete list of everyone you or your company does business with.
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Even the Federal Government cannot have such free access to your private records.
How can they claim to have a right to something you did before anyone even knew they had a patent to it. Surely the law can't expect every individual to know about all the patents out there.
Sure the law says you can't claim ignorance to defend yourself, but that applies to Laws not Patents...
lol
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