Prior Art - Acacia Streaming found?
 

Could some of you techies read over this publication on ZMODEM protocol for the BBS era and tell me if that Chapter #9 does indeed talk about streaming it is a complete chapter!!? Does this apply to Acacia?

http://timeline.textfiles.com/1988/1...LES/zmodem.txt

Tom
ICQ 2393986

Make sure you send it to Homegrown directly.

This is just from a quick read, but I'd say that streaming refers to the protocol being able to send at full speed, without waiting for an acknowledge that each block was received without any CRC errors (like XMODEM and YMODEM required). Errors are detected by the protocol while data is still 'streaming' in, then data is resent from the last successfully received position. This is the same sort of concept as TCP/IP.

Doh, been doing a ton of BBS history reading, just happened to scan over that and see it.....

Here is something else that struck my eye

Daniel T. Depew and Dean Ashley Lambey of Richmond Virginia are arrested on charges of plotting to kidnap, molest and kill a boy in a videotape. The pair initially contact undercover agents via a computer bulletin board service, bringing further attention to the case and considered to be one of the first nationwide computer bulletin board entrapment cases. Ultimately, Depew is sentenced to 33 years in prison and Lambey to 30. While the BBS angle is slight, it is played up significantly in the media, to the point that some papers indicate the pair were pre-selling the snuff film on local computer bulletin boards.

Source August 22, 1989, Washington Post, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Orange County Register

Wow, here check this out!

http://www.openwap.org/turboard/

In some of the Text documentation, it cites streaming and also animation or "frames" which to me talks about a movie using graphics and the best way to send the graphics to the terminals using compression.???

Notice the part that says this on the website:

NAPLPS is a ANSI method for sending compressed and machine independent codes for drawing primatives. Other presentation protocols that NAPLPS can compare to are the Remote Imaging Protocol (RIP from TeleGraphix, commonly used in BBS's today) and PostScript (the printer drawing protocol).

NAPLPS came from a international developement effort including names such as AT&T, DEC, Exxon, IBM, IEEE, NCR, Texas Insturments, Xerox, etc who sat down in 1983 and decided on the best and fastest presentation protocol for online graphics.

The standard was officially published by the Canadian Standards Association (CSA T500-1983) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI X3.110-1983). You can download a copy of Michael Dillion's explaination of it by clicking here (NAPLPS.ZIP 49K). The RFC 965 discusses formats for a graphical communication protocol and mentions NAPLPS.

COMPRESSED

that's the magic word!

You're on the right track, Sneak8r but into the wrong technical tree of documents. Try to aim your searches more towards networked multimedia implementations within that time frame. The invention being questioned claims to be a new system at that time which includes the following:[list=1][*]a method of digitizing and compressing analog signals (video, voice and music are what we want, vector graphics and pure digital computer imaging is outside of this)[*]storing the results in an indexed library[*]that a remote user of the system may access to make a selection[*]that is sent to a receiver[*]that decompresses and plays it or saves it for later viewing.[/list=1]
(That's still a work in progress and should not be considered a sustitute for studying the actual claims made within the patent(s) yourself)

Now if, for instance, you found a good, published description of how to encode a video or music file and upload it to a BBS to share with others, it might be a very good find.

Thanks, I will keep looking. I wonder how much Acacia would pay me if I found prior art to keep it secret =)
:1orglaugh


That document talks about putting images together in frames and viewing them on a network of terminals. At that time wouldn't that be video.... Got to think MPEG-2 did not exist back then we are talking old computer video (frames of pictures placed together like in the old cartoons) IMHO

I wonder what the Acacia twits reading the board whose jobs probably depend on this patent case are thinking?

Not to worry, we always need new gallery submitters.

The best place may be on very old archives of the newsgroups... some of the tech newsgroups back then were open source sharing and very detailed.

this is a good one.


From: Larry Rowe ([email protected])
Subject: Re: You feel alone Kathy
View: Complete Thread (2 articles)
Original Format
Newsgroups: comp.ivideodisc
Date: 1990-11-21 18:23:00 PST



I'm currently working on a shared video database and real-time conferencing testbed. The testbed includes a multimedia workstation, a high-speed local area network, and a high-bandwidth, large capacity storage system. The multimedia workstation includes a conventional high performance Unix workstation (Sparcstation) with a video-window board
(RasterOps), mouse, keyboard, microphone, and speaker I/O devices. The workstation also will have a symmetric video compression board so that real-time video can be captured and displayed in the video-window.
The local area network (Ultranet - 25 MBytes/sec host interface) and storage system will be used to support real-time video conferencing and to store hypermedia applications that can be simultaneously accessed by several workstations. The storage system is a disk array system (RAID) being developed by another group at Berkeley. Their next system will use DAT's to store data (approx. 1 GByte/tape) with a robot to load the tapes into one or more readers (possibly 4 with byte striping for high
bandwidth transfers).

The video compression board is being design and implemented by another student here at Berkeley. And, we're going to use a VME chasis and single board computer to build the network interface controller to the ultranet.

Finally, we have a hypermedia system that we implemented in an
interface toolkit, named Picasso, that we built in Common Lisp and the Common Lisp Object System that runs on X. We've already interfaced a Pioneer Laserdisc to the workstation and developed some applications that display video segments and images stored on the disc. Since the
video we had wasn't stereo, we also built an audio help system for one
of our applications using the other channel that is similar to the help
system on the Next.

We're hoping to be able to display video read from the storage server using the video compression board by the middle of next summer.

If you or someone else is interested in talking to me more about this
project, please send me email or call (415-642-5117).

another interesting one from 1989


Message 2 in thread
From: Steven Gutfreund ([email protected])
Subject: Re: fiber-optic lines at home, when?


View this article only
Newsgroups: comp.mail.multi-media
Date: 1989-10-10 13:52:08 PST


GTE is currently conducting an experiment in Cerritos CA. They have wired up several houses in the community (some with cable some with optic) and is exploring the delivery of video services (e.g. demand video, video conferencing, etc). The original development of the system was done here at GTE Labs.

We had to get special clearance from the FCC and local PUC to compete in the video marketplace. (yes, compete is the correct term - on a bullitin board here there are pictures of Cerritos video rental stores, and a sign that remarks that there future is limited after video on demand arrives).

--

It's becoming pretty obvious their patent should not have been issued.

The only way I can see Acacia winning is if the Judge owns a lot of Acacia stock. :1orglaugh

From: Heath Roberts ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Videos by Phone


View this article only
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Date: 1991-01-25 16:30:44 PST


In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (barj) writes:

>> Reportedly, the technology can transmit a two hour movie over phone
>> lines in fifteen seconds to thousands of destinations.
>If this is the case, you're going to need well over 300,000 telephones.
>And a mailman who will be prepared to deliver the 3500+ bills a day. :-)
>The Sonet/SDH intercontinental level is only going to use a bit-rate
>of 2.4Gbps and I doubt that _that_ will be anywhere near the market
>place by 1995.

Full motion video takes about ten to fifteen megabits per second of
bandwidth. Northern Telecom has 2.4Gb and 4.8Gb units on the market,
and higher-rate units working that have to be field-packaged (I can't
say any more specifics).

This kind of system (selectable video program) has been demonstrated
by Northern Telecom at a retirement community in Florida, and is part
of Fiberworld. It does require fiber optic cable to the customer
premises, and right now such service probably wouldn't be allowed by
regulatory agencies, but it is coming. At least technically.

The service the writer above mentioned is probably a movie-ordering
system. You call a number to see a given movie, the cable TV company
gets your number, maps it to the appropriate video box number, and
tells your decoder to let you watch the movie. The difference is that
your LEC is NOT providing the video, only subscriber information to
the cable franchise. This has been tariffed in a few states already.

What is the acutal date the art has to pre-date?

To be safe, the art should be before 1990.

The 1990 post is interesting from the berkley guy, it might be early enough too.. but the problem is that in my understanding this does not HAVE to invalidate their patent or some of their claims, since its just someone inventing it, having the idea, just like they had the idea... They were just sooner to patent it.

The other post about the test from GTE does not help, its fixed lines, the point of the patent from acacia IS to have non-fixed lines.

Using that logic, you could just go find someone using some method for 50 years, then go patent it and sue them for using it. It would make sense that the patent would not be valid because someone, or many people, were already doing what you claim you invented. The word invent and copy don't have the same meaning.

Just because you were the first to patent it shouldn't mean anything once it goes to court. I don't know how it really works in court today, but allowing someone to patent a known technology and then try to prevent others from using it is the exact opposite of what the patent system was intended to do.

If you didn't invent something, you should have no right to stop others from using it. In this case, it's even worse, because they didn't even enforce the bogus patent for about 10 years probably because even the people who filed it didn't think it covered what it's now being claimed to cover.

The whole Acacia situation should be made into an example for the need for patent reform.

Acacia has made it patently clear that they are reading the boards.

Their patent is "open".

To the best of my understanding, this means that they can continually revise them. IMO, they are apt to find this info just as helpful as the defense group might.

I am very appreciative for everyone that is doing the homework on Prior Art. This is immensely helpful in more ways than I can possibly say. The amount of work and level of knowledge is impressive to say the least.

However, please call Spike at 949-716-8080 and discuss it with him before posting it publicly.


Thank you!

impai.org

nope... Acacia has a patent for a system that is comprised of many pieces. Zmodem could be used as a specific technology within their system.

Feel free to read my article on Prior Art at my website to learn more. We need more people looking!

I have been very busy to my own research into this issue.