Look Out Acacia!!! 1989 BBS FLI File
 

http://www.iiiii.com/sachiko2.avi (converted to DIVX AVI file)

http://riverbbs.net/cds/share/2/animate/files.bbs (File Description)
SACHIKO.ZIP FLI: Oriental girl playing music.

http://riverbbs.net/cds/share/2/animate/ (Listing)
SACHIKO.ZIP 16-Oct-1989 23:26 133k
http://riverbbs.net/cds/share/2/animate/SACHIKO.ZIP (available)
SACHIKO.FLI 10/16/1989 11:26 PM
(24 Keyframes, a bit over 1 second in length)

FLIVIEW for WINDOWS
http://sac-ftp.gratex.sk/graph43.html (Listing)
ftp://sac-ftp.gratex.sk/graph/pwflc252.zip (available)

One part of the prior art that would invalidate Acacia's patent(s) is tangible evidence of video having been digitized, compressed and made available for selection and download to remote locations before their patent application.

This isn't some dry technical document that describes the invention in a way that their lawyers could pick apart and argue about for weeks, I'm talking about concrete examples of people having done what is described in their invention before they got around to filing for it.

The problem with finding these examples is "where are they more than ten years later?" Hearsay evidence such as "I remember downloading 2 second fuck videos in 1966" doesn't count. Also, files stored on hard disks are suspect, file dates can easily be changed on Unix.

However, a number of BBS's through the late 1980's mounted CD-ROM's, making the files available to their members. These are ideal places to look, you just can't tamper with a pressed CD-ROM and a file date there is a file date you can bank on. CD-ROM's that were made especially for BBS's had a file named "files.bbs" within them, which gave a description of each file so the user could make a better decision whether to download or not.

Anyway, what you see here is my first find, from October of 1989! There are more out there, and we need them all!!!

Send information of these finds to Spike @ homegrownvideo.com
as well as brandon @ fightthepatent.com and remember:

Support <A HREF="http://www.impai.org/" target="_blank">IMPA</A> to protect our usage of on-line media and <A HREF="http://www.fightthepatent.com/" target="_blank">Fight the Patent!</A>

:eek7

Top Ten sig spot for sale.

I remember FLI files. Hell, I remember when GIF came out.

SpaceAce

very nice stuff

I actually remember several types of early digital animation formats. I had to tools to create FLIs and other types. Those tools were common as were tools to do things like store each individual frame from an animation as a seperate image file.

SpaceAce

yeah FLIs were awsome :thumbsup

One more thing: BBS culture is still alive and well right here on the internet. Search Google for "telnet BBS" and you'll find hundreds running Wildcat!, SearchLight, PCBBS, Renegade and dozens of others. I bet some of the BBS operators still have old FIDO-net archives and BBS file CDs.

Someone point Spike in that direction.

SpaceAce

People are findin stuff left and right :thumbsup Good job guys!

jDoG

There are a number of us looking along these lines, but more are needed! When you find a batch of these, it can be somewhat time consuming to go through.

They're all going to be zipped, so you have to open the zip file, save the *.fli file to disk and then open that in FLIVIEW (which is an excellent viewer but klutzy to use).

In non-adult offerings (such as River BBS), practically everything is going to be computer graphic animations, which do us no good. They are, however fun to watch and I certainly don't get bored looking at them. They were doing some fantastic stuff back in the day! Also, video examples found in these caches can be shown on national TV when this fight starts getting the attention it deserves.

What's needed is pre-1990 videos. The one I found is only a second long but it counts, they didn't have 30 minute files back then. :)

Adult BBS CD-ROM's ought to have a lot more of these as well as being more fun to go through. But someone has to do it, the only cost to you is a bit of time.

I think that stock is going to buckle soon and hopefully the investors will ban together and put their own lawsuit against Acacia.

Its pretty sad how they are taking a combined total over $500k in salery when the company without the investors would not make that in 10 years. Another sad thing is that most of the people who are pusing the stock up actually work in the adult industry and are only adding to the legal funding of these crooks. Not that it matters but no one thinks about the fact as they stand to gain more money from their own shares which they got long ago for dirt cheap. So the only ones who will really get rich on this deal is the owners of Acacia itself right before they cash out at $10 per share and let the stock crumble.


Fuck Acacia may they burn in hell for eternity! :feels-hot

well done and congratulations.

I've looked a bit and have made some progress, but some of the better leads seem to be the actual manufacturers of the tools that did video compression back then (1983-1989). Apple II utils, Mac utils, and possibly C64 utils, Atari 400 and 800 and whatever else came next, and Amiga utils.

Amiga had a HUGE video digitizing, editing, and distribution (BBS) scene in the late 80s, so that's probably the best bet (even though I was never a part of that scene). The first Amiga came out in Sept. 1985, and gained a massive BBS support userbase; surely backups of those must exist. Unfortunately, CDRoms were a fairly new thing for computers in 1988 (I never saw one before 1988), but I'm sure the Amiga fanbase out there have a lot of proof of prior art.

Fiveyes.. this is AWESOME!! Great work on this. This could cement everything!

Keep up the work guys and keep searching as the more evidence there is the weaker their case is.

I'm glad we've all bannd together on this and are making a difference. Way to go everyone! Thank you Fiveyes! :thumbsup

Oh, you think they're overpaid at Acacia? Check out what they did at the first of this month: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da...-03-002017.txt
And their inside trading report: http://www.acaciaresearch.com/investors_insideractg.htm

Now that the stock is over 7/share, their salaries are a pittance...

Yes the Amiga was the first and best multimedia computer, I dont remember when I got my Amiga 500 but if someone was playing videos back then it was the Amiga crowd :thumbsup

This just cements one more brick into place. We need a wall of bricks!

Just think of the defense going to court with a couple of hundred of these examples, all of them pre-1990, that prove the Acacia invention was trying to cover what everybody with a modem was doing at the time- downloading pretty pictures!

IIIII,

Great find! RiverBBS.net was down for a long time, glad to see it's back up. I contacted Mitch (SYSOP of River BBS) a while back, great guy, really pissed off about this patent when i chatted with him, especially when he too saw digital audio/video before 1990. He has offered to provide testimony to the files he has on his machine, so he is definitely helping out.

I had never seen a FLI file that had actual images (usually just animation/cartoony stuff)... awesome find! And thanks for converting it to a viewable format for us, because some of these old DOS programs just don't run under a DOS shell.

I will add this Sachiko file to my prior art page, crediting you for the find.

Excellente!

I already posted that i have a bunch of these files, fli, gras and others but nobody seemes to care...strange.

I just found that Adobe's ImageReady reads FLI files w/o any problems, so if if someone doesn't want to hassle with FLIVIEW (it's not a DOS program, but a bare bones 32bit windows app and the "open file" window is awkward), they can use that to view them.

Good for converting FLI to GIF as well, but you gain a lot of weight in the conversion. The FLI format, based upon the Autodesk animation program, was state of the art in compression through that time, much prefered on the BBS's over GL and DL formats.

I DO care, and i must have missed your post.

As you have said and as some have seen, there are alot of examples of digital audio and video out there, existing well before 1990.

The problem is the verification of the date stamp. The file date won't hold up in court since it could have been forged. BBS Logs or CDROM archive (purchased from a software distributor for use on BBS) are a great source of validation.

Sometimes a google search on the filename of the file will reveal an online BBS/FILE log. Combine with the file you have on your hard drive, this proves potential prior art!

Feel free to post the validating evidence to the file date of your file, and i'll add it to the Prior Art page.


Fight the Patent!

keep it up guys, wonderful work. Dont worry about the nay-sayers, just do it :thumbsup

yeah,i was about to post it.



nice finding fiveyes.

Have 1988 PC
Still working

With Pornos on it ;-))

So how can I tell what files they are???

My son downloaded a bunch of pornos than (videos, pictures and stuff) we never reformatted it, just bought a new one later and kept the old one standing around..

I am gonna start the old one up and look around to see what I can find

A good friend of mine "wrote" the first digitizer for the Amiga. It was hardware.

It can't be stressed enough that we have to submit these things to the proper people. They couldn't monitor these boards 24/7 even if anyone expected them to.

If you find something that looks good, let FightThisPatent (brandon @ fightthepatent.com) and Spike (Spike @ homegrownvideo.com) know! Be a shame to have everyone congradulate you and not have the people who can really use the information left in the dark.

Just borrowing Gem's nick..

You guys are running all over the place like chickens without your heads.

Why hasn't someone been to adobe and autodesk and done searches on the software itSELF that made the files you are hunting. Sure you need some examples but the actual animation pro or adobe software is irrefutable in court with a positive date of manufacture.

I can't see how any court could ignore that fact even without examples of the end product. And it might even be possible to invalidate acacia simply because the software is/was no doubt patented to process the files period and end of sentance.

Give her the credit if this works out.

Might be a good lead if you can chase it down! If other people purchased the digitizer board and made digital video, and then stored it on a BBS, and other people were able to download, whether being able to play with a video player, or had to use the propreitary software that came with the board, would still could as potential prior art.

As your friend if he recalls people sharing their digitized video files via BBS....


Fight the Patent!

A good point to search, but it doesn't necessarily help provide prior art. A hammer can be used to build something or tear it down. The hammer is a tool, much like software is.

The GIF89 spec created the ability to loop together individual gif images to create animation. Software was created that used the GIF89 spec.

We believe a GIF89 file could count as prior art if the animated images were of digitized images, to create a video-effect. Whether it be 1 FPS, or 29.97 FPS, it's still "video".

But, the actual file is needed to be able to prove that this was done, despite the GIF89 specification and the software that could provide that capability, much like the hammer.

Another example, Autodesk FLI format and software, or IBM's Storyboard Plus software are software tools for creating animated presentations. Some crafty person figured out that if you put a digital image in each slide, and then played the slideshow, that it made a "video".

So just having the software that could create these files is not enough. Digital video editing from companies like Avid and Intel (plus other hardware for Amiga and Mac) existed prior to 1990. The quest is to find instances where that digitized video was shared to multiple people via BBS or FTP system.

The movie/broadcast/production industry could provide some insight, which GregB is chasing down.



Fight the Patent!

could be scary the stuff you find that your son may have downloaded prior to 1990 :)


When you do find some video or audio files that have a date stamp of before 1990, try doing a google search on the filename to see if you can find some bbs log file on the web that has that file that can validate the date.. date maybe different, but if the file is the same, then you have some great evidence!


Fight the Patent!

ROFLMAO!!!! Fiveyes, don't even worryaboudit!!! Talked with Brandon yesterday and if all goes well there will be so much evidence you'll need a bulldozer to shovel it into the courtroom. Matter of fact I'm betting on about 10,000 or more people gonna be real sore when they find out about the acacia patent. This oughtta be a gooood one.

Baal: Please contact Spike asap: 949-716-8080

Holllllllld da' bus!!!

I just remembered back in the mid 80's we used compressed graphics in animation over our news network for d'load and distribution over all three major news networks. Lemme call HQ because all those files have timestamps and are archived throughout the world as well as the copyright offices globally.

I think this is a cut and dried situation.

Keep the good work coming and make sure Spike sees this :)

Let's make it a parade of bulldozers piling evidence into the courtroom! :)

Thanks to all of you, btw!

ya! and you can film it and then edit it up... with the court decision to invalidate the patent claims, we can now put the video up for all to watch :Graucho

But then, we may have to take the video off because the next battle could be with other patent holders like USA Video (suing MovieLink.com) or Burst.com (suing M$ Windows Media) or even SightSound (suing CDNOW/BMG) should they come around next.

:(

Fight the Patent!

there's always room to find that tiny shiny gold nugget after sifting through a stream of rubble.... so feel free to keep digging.

This page summarizes things that i am looking for: http://www.FightThePatent.com/v2/Searching.html



Fight The Patent!

nice find fiveeyes

One of the things I like about your approach, Bandon, is that the evidence being amassed now against Acacia's patent(s) can most likely be recycled whenever these other hyenas show up on the scene. Also, when (and I don't mean if!) Acacia is taken down a notch on their absurd claims, these other parasites might give a second thought to the "low hanging fruit".