What did you think of the Acacia show today?
 

Don't think I've seen a thread discussing the show today with the Acacia representative, so here we go. What did you think? How did you think D did? How did you think Acacia did?

Has your overall outlook changed? Are you scared shitless? Are you more excited than ever?

Do you think the show was a mistake? Do you think it was simply good journalism? Should Acacia be brought back on another show?

What the fuck do you think? I know what I think, but am curious as to where others now stand. Will you be signing the license soon?

--

If you didn't listen to the D-Money show today, listen to it here: http://www.d-moneyshow.com/liveshow/dm07292003.wmv

If you didn't listen to it last week, listen here (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED): http://d-moneyshow.com/liveshow/dm07232003.wmv

im eating the best fucking sandwich ever right now.

jalepeno mustard.
pepper jack jalepeno cheese
and black peppered turkey

man ive found my new fave

thought id share that ;)

It was a stupid idea.. gave Acacia invaluable propaganda leverage just for dmoney to have a fucking scoop.

there WAS interesting info in the show.. like affiliates being safe, and live streaming seeming to be ok, but in this environment with everyone running around thinking the sky is falling it was a bad idea to give them validity. People are already commenting on how sure he seemed of the patents.. for fucks sake.. this guy is a spruik, a salesman, it's his fucking job.

video in a zip is only "potentially" infringing. A lot of what he had to say wasn't even that confident. It's just giving Acacia a voice which is scaring people. Plus the IMPA got dumped on.

from what I understood from the show, affiliates are only safe if the sponsor they're promoting is licensed with Acacia. If the sponsor isn't licensed with them then they expect to collect from the affiliate.

Do you think his answers to various questions have created a sigh of relief for some adult webmasters while making life even more hectic for others?

Do you think the typical affiliate (our definition, not the legal definition) is now safe from any further prosecution?

Regardless of what Acacia stated, do you think "double dipping" may still in fact happen?

Acacia seemed fairly confident that several mainstream companies would be signing on soon. Do you believe that? Or was it just another scare tactic?

I think it was good. I'm glad Acacia was on.

yeah we're talking about a hypothetical win though. And I just got up to the bit where he talks about livestreaming only temporarily being ok and they're trying to patch up that bit and add on to their existing claims.

It was great...

connect.... buffering 15% buffering....35%... reconnect....
buffering..... 38% buffering.... 52%... reconnect....

yeah for anyone that can see through what was being said, but there seem to be plenty of scared people.

I'd say thats a fair assessment

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

ok d, that was harsh but it's a gut reaction after hearing the bashing the IMPA got.

bhutocracy: Wasn't his definition of "affiliate" different than ours...?

You call that a beating?

yeah affiliates in the sense we know it are safe - he meant affiliates as in other companies defendants may part or majority own.

Absolutely.

The legal definition of "affiliate" is more related to an actual partnership. "Affiliates" have actual "stock" in the giving company and vice versa. Similar to "sister companies", I would imagine.

The "affiliate" we, adult webmasters, use is merely a nice sounding term. Affiliates have very little control over the sponsor company. Affiliates are actually resellers, of a sort.

I call it a bashing. He bashed the IMPA. he didn't beat them to a pulp but he gave them a good one-sided hiding.. i think the show would have been better with an IMPA representative, he made them sound like amatuers that were fucking the industry over by not being truthful with us.

he said "bullshit" :Graucho

I think it was a great and very informative show. I learned a lot from that show.

For you guys that say it is a bunch of propoganda on their part, you really need to do some research on this subject. I have read my ass off on the subject and pretty much EVERYTHING the guy says has legal merit and is supported by the patent laws and documents that I have read (including Part 35 of the USC)

I have said many times the ONLY way around this is going to be to present prior art to invalidate the patent. And as he says in the interview, if you sign an agreement and the patent is invalidated (and this will take years if it can be done) you can stop payment to the immediately.

He hit it dead on when he was talking about legal fees. If you infringe on a patent and you are taken to court, you can be assested up to 3 times the damages plus all of the court costs if you lose. To fight that would cost a shit load of money.

I am not taking sides here on this one, but I think before people start spatting shit out about stuff they don't know about they should read up on the subject. If you want to read some good stuff about it and educate yourself do some searches in Yahoo or Google for these keywords: US Patent Law, Patent Extortion, Patent Infringement, etc....


Flow
:2 cents:

I just don't think an Acacia spruik should have had an unchallanged 30 minute platform. It's like putting your gloves down and giving someone free punches.. the next one should be a lot better.

thats pretty obvious, or you can go totally offshore.

How can one go totally offshore to escape any risk of patent infringement? Are you planning on moving to a different planet?

From reading Acacia's package it would appear that their version of an affiliate is anyone who has a material interest in a company that is breaching their patent.

For example, if my partner and I had a company in front of us as we run our amateur site then Acacia could chase the company first and if they were unsuccessful they could then come after my partner and me and sue us for the patent infringements.

While I agree with bhutocracy (and others) that recognising Acacia does seem to give them some credibility I also think that hearing their version of their claim is very helpful for anyone formulating a defence.

Personally I think that they played on ignorance to gain their patent and now they are going to have to defend it in a much more difficult environment.

Their patents only cover so many countries.

that fucking lawyer didnt answer anything i didnt already know.

however one thing i did notice.

everytime he talked about his technology he said 'streaming' and didnt answer any questions about different methods of providing video to the masses.
'i will have to ask my engineers about that'

yeah right.

I tried to have members from IMPA on, but their feed was bad, so they couldn't comment on some things.

We figured next week they can have their take on what was said.

Again, I subcontract the hosting for the live show seperately from my regular hosting, so we had only 4 T-1's broadcasting the media player live. If we had burstable bandwidth hosted on a bigget pipeline, we would have been fine.

In all fairness, we never knew what our max crowd would be because we never had this many people. Last week we had an idea it would have issues, so we lowered the bit rates. Now we know we must have more juice for the live shows, we're working on it.

To say having them on is a big mistake is a real stupid thing to say. Aren't we all adults with minds of our own? What's the fear?

It's like saying "I'd rather not know any better". That wouldn't hold up when it's your time in court. "Sorry judge, I had no idea".

Be glad we had an opportunity to hear a variety of subjects concerning this patent. We didn't exactly tell people to go one way or the other, as the D$ Show. We just asked the questions.

I guess I should go back to having KB impressions and bizzle fizzle drizzle talk.

I can't win sometimes....


LOL

Anyway, I did this show today because I felt as adult webmasters we have a right to know Acacia's claims.

You're all entitled to your opinions, I don't think any less of anyone if they didn't like it. You don't have to like it, but you shold be informed....

this is true, I've just been disheartened by people being taken in by them. Im actually less scared of them after listening to the show, even if you couldn't escape signing up with them, the whole if their patent is invalidated you don't have to keep on paying etc etc.

You don't trade traffic? Buy traffic? Sell traffic?

They'll get you somehow.

How's this, IMPA had their own show last week without Acacia on...

I don't believe canada is covered at all in their patents... so if you're a canadian, unless you host in the us (and that's still unsure but I'm looking into it), Acacia has no claim.

you have no need to defend the show dude. having them on was important even if it wasnt that informative.
i appreciate you putting that together.
:2 cents:

I can't believe there wasn't a rep from IMPA to bring some balance, i hope acacia paid for the air time :-)

I'd like to see them track down a traffic purchase between two webmasters... and what could they do? scare the seller maybe..

Hows this, IMPA is on OUR SIDE and represents OUR interests.

IMPA would rather hear the stream first, in my opinion...

Then next week when they come on the show, it will make better listening...


Robert Berman said he'd come on the show anytime we want..


So stay tuned, you might just get both soon.

Look, I DID find the show informative, and I am glad that I heard what he had to say. But there are a whole bunch of people today that acacia now has their hooks into that they didn't yesterday.. was that collateral damage worth it? who can say. I can't even be selfish and determine whether im better off from having the chance to hear it, it depends on how scared other people got, and how well acacia came off overall.

See his answer to why they aren't going after M$, real, quicktime etc...

He was like there are so many streaming solutions you can use, like 10. We dont want to go after the server guys who are selling servers for small margins, we want to go after the guys with recurring memberships. He was like media player is free, how can we get a percentage of that ? WTF?

:ak47:

What is their market cap? M$ could buy them out and take their 55M in cash and that would basically cover the cost of the damn purchase...

but...



they have real products, and don't have to rely on strong arm extortion tactics on little guys. (well they might, but not on some shit assed patent on something they didn't invent)


He also said something to the effect of, the adult internet generates 1 - 3 billion. He was like we want our 2%...




:321GFY to that.

I wonder who they're sending to internext and if they are going to have those packets, or wear name tags with acacia on it etc...

They're asking for some of those CE sponge boobs to be tossed their way at the least :)

I'm listening to the archive again, this guy cannot seem to give a straight answer to any questions.. Did anyone else find him wandering off and talking about things that were in HIS interests? VERY misleading, very evasive... Not as informative as I would have liked, and not for the lack of effort on D-Money's part. Thanks for trying, D!

I liked the show. Lots of useful information there.

Of course - he's got to keep his powder dry - I think it would have been surprising if he had spilled his guts

Very frustrating though.

Interesting - he keeps referring to a percentage of gross - our package made NO mention of a percentage - for us there was just a flat fee.

Couple things to think about
Having Berman on today let you know more about who/what you're dealing with with regards to Acacia's position

Having listened to part of the broadcast and then going back and listening to it in entirety I realized Acacia may still "double dip" (listen closely, video providers are only exempt and covered by what Acacia terms webmaster license if the video providers DON'T provide video samples on their site and don't make content available via zip file download)

In my not so humble opinion Berman didn't come off well in some segments of the show and obviously did a lot of tap dancing

Darren you did a very good job today, much thanks

it's better to be educated than not

I hear you man...

No worries, it can be debated.

Me personally, I'd rather know as much as I can before heading to the show and meeting with them.

This gave everyone an idea of what their claiming. I'd bet everyone listening learned something they didn't know, even if they won't admit it.

I still think the main way to prove that the Acacia patent is bullshit is to go back to the original reason that it was rejected the first time it was put to the US patent office. They found it to be "unpatentable." When the Acacia guy was grilled on it he didn't have much to say, only that the first time they didn't "understand" the technology.

It's obvious to me they just pushed their bullshit through the overworked U.S. patent office until someone bit on it.

Interesting Reading on the Acacia Patent (.pdf)

I have to give you props for patience... He was very pushy in my opinion, loved to argue, and was preachy.. I would have lost it and started screaming at him :)

I shouldn't have said you were after a scoop, I was listening to it as I was posting and was at the IMPA bashing part, I learned a lot I didn't know, and am grateful of the chance to hear it, just people are getting uneccessarily scared.. I just really think this is a topic you don't have to be impartial on - it's not webmaster vs webmaster, it's david against goliath with leeches against our industry - fuck giving them a fair platform, they should be shadowed by the IMPA every time they open their mouths. The factual information we got was great, but they also got the chance to put spin and scare into people that could have been avoided with rebuttals, if thats going to be on the next show than great..

ps the fake larry flynt thing was funny as fuck.

scare tactics and extorsion. all the people from acacia DESERVE to ROT IN HELL

Thanks for the support and kind words.

All I have to say is, others should be in my shoes for a second and try asking the questions. The pressure of asking the right questions is tough enough. I've been up for 48 hours making sure I asked the best questions I could, worded the best way.

When you listen to the archive, listen to the way things are worded. It took time to ensure I wouldn't be clowned for asking the wrong questions.


And if I get slammed for my questions, I know I can handle the heat. I've taken heat in the past. But I feel this was the right thing to do, communicate effectively. I'm an adult webmaster like everyone else, so I know people wanted those questions asked...