More evidence of Acacia prior art?
 

This make sense?

Micro League Wrestling
Publisher: Microprose
Developer Subway Software

"As part of the pre-match build-up, the game loads digitised inter-view sequences between 'Mean Gene' Okerlund and each wrestler, in which each mat-man tells anyone who can be bothered to listen, how much better they are than the others. The screen then switches to the ringside where the Master of Ceremonies announces the match and introduces the contenders."

http://www.atari.st/data/boxes/2793.jpg

I read this article a few months ago: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...net/index.html

The article is about some guys that archived all of usenet back to 1981. If there is anyone out there that would have evidence of video that had been transmitted over the internet before 1990 it would be these guys. I suggest contacting those guys.

Here is a usenet post from 1989, it's some guy offering a 318k sound clip for download.

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=cl...ton.EDU&rnum=1

Is that when Acacia's patent started? 1990?

I even remember a digitizer, video cam system for the C64... I wish I kept all my computing mags...

Just found this...Haven't really looked through a lot of it in detail yet, but there are a LOT of names provided from some of the more famous BBS systems prior to the internet boom. It goes back to 1976. Might help produce a few more leads on people who could be reached for information.

http://timeline.textfiles.com

So, is there any word as to when someone may be getting Acacia into court to start disputing this crap?

http://www.myatari.net/issues/oct2003/images/cover.gif

Hot Shoes :thumbsup

great digging.. the usenet archives on google is a great thing..

there were certainly digital audio files out before 1990, Star Trek, HAL9000, Max Headroom, etc..were all floating around.

The problem is to find the actual file and recorded evidence that the file was around.

I am not sure how the courts will take a usenet post, retrieved from Google, as being evidence of documentation.. i hope it would, or atleast help to back up other evidence that prior art did exist.


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yes, excellent site.. Jason from textfiles.com has been helpful in trying to track down prior art leads from BBS.

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Acacia's patent application was filed on January 7 ,1991

Prior art needs to have a datestamp, one year before the filing date, so anything before 1990 would be what we are all looking for.


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for sure, and surely someone who had this kind of equiment would have thought to make a digital "movie" to share with people via BBS.... contact any C64 BBS or people you know to point them to my website http://www.FightThePatent.com to learn more...

Things to look for can be found at http://www.FightThePatent.com/v2/Searching.html



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Diamond: A Multimedia Message System Built on a Distributed Architecture
IEEE Computer, Vol. 18, No. 12, pp. 65-78, 1985

Found a lot of citings of this article within other texts, but not having any luck finding the article itself.

From various pieces I've been able to gather from different searches it looks like this article specifically mentions transmitting audio and video "over regular telephone lines" as does Acacia's patent.

Alot of the older publications only exist on dusty shelves in libraries and in the homes of geeks...

I think i found one geek that has the whole library of IEEE magazines, so i'll see if he can find this article.

great post... for other prior art searches, check out http://www.FightThePatent.com/v2/Searching.html


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Here is a usenet post from 1989, it's some guy offering a 318k sound clip for download.


wow, that is very interesting. There's some people here in NY that would love that info. I'm forwarding it now. Thanks.

digital audio did exist prior to 1990 as you have found and was downloadable via BBS and FTP.. this is exactly what Acacia is claiming to own the patent to... guess what, 1989 was before their patent filing date....

The Problem is just tracking down the actual file so it can be played to the court, as well as documenting the existance of the file for download.... google may provide a form of data stamping the timeframe.


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http://www.gen-networks.com/leadership.html#pdujardin

If that link doesn't come up right, scroll down to the profile on Paul Dujardin

Might be worth trying to get in touch with him. He worked at AT&T in the early 80's and claims to have helped pioneer digital compression technology in satellites, which is another thing mentioned in Acacia's patent.

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/undergrad/Cours...p4.2.html#H261

H.261 Video Conferencing standard technology was developed between 1988 and 1990. Covers audio, video and compression. I'm sure more searches on that standard will bring up plenty of stuff usable against acacia as it's very well documented.

http://david.egbert.name/work/newmed...ory/index.html

Quicktime wasn't released until 1991. You can drop that from your searches

http://www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1999/May10/41.htm

Little bit down the page...

"The first videoconferencing system, from Compression Labs Inc. of San Jose, Calif., arrived in 1988 to link the New Mexico and California facilities."

Compression Labs doesn't seem to have a web site of their own, but I found address and phone number on business.com

Compression Labs, Inc.
2860 JUNCTION AVENUE
SAN JOSE, CA
+1 408 4353000
+1 408 9225429

They also deal with high-end military applications and include work on satellite, microwave, and cable systems. If you can reach anyone there, I'm sure they've got some info worth looking into.

Don't make fun of us IEEE geeks. :mad:

Quite a discovery.... this is the first anti-acacia argument that may actually hold up! :thumbsup

Leonardo Chiariglione is the founder of MPEG.

1987 - Leonardo establishes the International Workshop on 64 kbit/s Coding of Moving Video to promote adoption of low bitrate video coding technologies for emerging digital networks

1988 - Leonardo establishes the ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) standards committee.

MPEg was developed before the scope of their patent, but that alone doesn't dispute the patent. The patent is about compressed video being transmitted from one place to another through a transmitter and receiver. The mpeg standard doesn't cover any kind of transport, only the compression itself.

I found several references to Quick Time 1.0 coming out in 1990,

What i am interested is in a possible beta program that would have taken place in 1989 that people were able to download quicktime files from a BBS.


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Excellent posts! keep them coming..

if could email your leads to brandon at FightThePatent.com i can put them in my research folder so i can add them to my list of searches.


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My point of posting about the founders of MPEG is that if you contact those people, chances are they'll be able to provide you with lots of information on what was going on with video on the internet before 1990.

I agree.. all great leads... question is whether these people will take the time to want to get invovled.

I sent out email to Leonardo of chiariglione.org to get his insight into all of this.


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I've got all my original Amiga files in storage, hundreds of disks and there's a hard drive in the 2000. I haven't used it since the 80's.

I'll get that shit out and see what's on it. I have lots of stuff I downloaded.

This is incredibly great input!

Good luck finding something in your archives MattO, that could be amazingly helpful.

Under U.S. law, a patent cannot be granted for an invention described in a printed publication more than one year before the filing date of the application for patent [35 USC 102(b)].

Ref.

Sooo.. An actual file shouldn't be necessary if the publications containing the information about the process/s in question are dated a year earlier than the patent app. date.

It does help to show the court that the 'invention' existed prior to the patent in a more tangible way...

What's more impressive, a file that plays an audio message like HAL9000 saying 'Good morning Dave', or a directory file listing that like HalTalk3.exe 12000 bytes 12-12-1989 ?

of course having a HAL9000 audio file will play alot nicer in court than some adult-oriented sound file :Graucho

Prior art in publications does help go towards invalidating patent claims.

It also helps if you make your case as simple as possible to demonstrate to the court that this 'invention' already existed, rather than get stuck in very subtle technicalities.


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Once you find some digitized audio or video by looking at the datestamp to be before 1990, the next step will be to somehow prove that this file was made available for download on a BBS.

File dates can be manipulated, so the effort next would be to find a BBS that has log files to validate the date stamp, a CDROm archive that the SYSOP might have purchased and used on the BBS, from where your file(s) came from, etc.


Keep digging! :thumbsup





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this may have been pointed out before but has anybody been here:

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/

MattO could be the key to this whole thing...you'll get a lifetime membership to my site if you come up with some good stuff for sure

Not sure if any of this will help, but here goes..

Some guy :: I worked at Apple Computer from 1988 to 1992.
http://christhorman.com/projects/diary/apple/

--

Here is some more information, a group of people that may have delt with compressed audio would be the DJ business.

"The problem with this is that the speed at which the telephone networks in the late 1980's sent information was far too slow for uncompressed audio. As a result, several companies undertook extensive research to discover an effective way to compress audio enough to be sent over the telephone lines."

http://david.weekly.org/mp3book/ch1.php3

--

I'll GUARANTEE you that the creaters of MPEG transmitted files to eachother online or through a network while developing the technology AND testing the technology.

Would evidence of "Some music in IFF music format..." (IFF was an 8-bit sound format developed by Commodore for use on the Amiga range of computers) stored and made available on an anonymous ftp server and dated 1987-11-18 be of any interest? Reference is halfway down the page at this (LONG!) URL to archived NewsGroup posting:
http://www.google.com/groups?q=+musi...ue.edu&rnum=25

Compressed sound recordings made available 1990-06-01 in IFF format, LZH compressed files:
http://www.google.com/groups?q=song+...asa.gov&rnum=6

Songs digitized for both Mac and Amiga and made available on an anonymous ftp server on 1990-06-29:
http://www.google.com/groups?q=song+...ey.edu&rnum=24

On 1990-10-09, "a comprehensive sound site containing over 12 megabytes of sound files for your IBM/MAC/Amiga compatible computers" is announced on an anonymous ftp server with explicit instructions on how to access the files:
http://www.google.com/groups?q=song+...ch.edu&rnum=40

Finally, evidence of an adult oriented DL animation distributed on the BBS network in the early 1990's (possibly before?) can be found at (Martin Rimm's infamous cyberporn study) :
http://www.sics.se/~psm/kr9512-001.html#note132
'One animation, entitled "birra," depicted a woman urinating into the mouth of another. Made in Italy,[132] it was discovered on seventeen "adult" BBS in the United States and downloaded more than 500 times.' The reference link (http://www.sics.se/~psm/kr9512-002.html#note132), says, regarding this animation, "[132] The animation was initially distributed by (or pirated from) Davide Toma and Luca De Gregio, Milano, Italy."
That's a misspelling of their names, as evidenced at http://www.textfiles.com/computers/D...ON/dl-view.txt which shows they authored a user manual for a "DL VIEWER" in 1990 and actually created the DL animation file format. But it's doubtful they "authored" the clip in question.

Here's a 28 page document "Digital Video Coding Standards And Their Role In Video Communications":

http://<a href="http://www.cs.umb.ed...sikora.pdf</a>

It includes a history of video encoding and transmission dating back to at least 1980 and a large bibliography with references dating back to the 1980's and even a couple from the 1970's.

-----------------------------------------

In 1987 Leonardo Chiariglione ([email protected]) established the International Workshop on 64 kbit/s Coding of Moving Video to promote adoption of low bitrate video coding technologies for emerging digital networks:

http://<a href="http://www.chiarigli...biography/</a>

-----------------------------------------

A History of Video Conferencing:

http://<a href="http://myhome.hanafo.../vchx.html</a>

Ooops! Broke the URLs. Here they are:

http://www.cs.umb.edu/~asi/multimedia/papers/sikora.pdf
http://www.chiariglione.org/leonardo/biography/
http://myhome.hanafos.com/~soonjp/vchx.html

yes!



the other stuff listed was 1990 or after.. prior art needs to be BEFORE 1990.....


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I agree.

1987 - Leonardo establishes the International Workshop on 64 kbit/s Coding of Moving Video to promote adoption of low bitrate video coding technologies for emerging digital networks.

This guy was working with compressed video over digital networks in 1987, and not just him, he was the organizer of a whole group of people that were working on this. I think getting in touch with these people would provide a gold mine of evidence for prior art, either they would have it themselves or they would be able to tell you the most likely place to find it.

For those doing prior art searches, a quick list of things i am working on..... feel free to see what you can turn up:

All Prior Art finds need to be before 1990 to count.

Current Searches:


Video-on-Demand documentation/proposals. FCC may have a library of such documents.
(Waiting on reply from former commissioner Patricia Diaz Dennis)


Individuals who worked at Bell Labs that were involved with digital audio/video.


Soundcap files (as well as documentation of the file list to show availability before 1990)
(Developers found, waiting on replies)


PDP11 use of digitized audio


Weather (NASA/JPL) or Satellite movies


Electronic copies of IEEE articles/papers on Video on Demand over ATM or Fiber Optics


Quicktime public releases before 1990.
(Looking to contact Steve Jobs and Frank Casanova)


Digital audio or video on Commodore 64, Apple II, Mac (Hyperstack), NeXT, Amiga, etc


PC Speaker (DOS) .exe files that had digitized audio (ie. christmas, classical songs, etc).


DUOSOUND files


GIF89a files (not animation or cartoony, but using digitized images in a loop to make a video-like presentation)


Video Guided missiles and digital


AP system for transferring videos


BBS SYSOPS with CDROM archives prior to 1990






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I don't have any of my bbs archived, but I do have a copy of every c64 rom, atari rom, etc...
complete with cracker/coder/trainer information and copyrights on the crack demo screen (a bit like a short intro advertising who cracked the software or made the cheat.. usually some light music, but no animation..)

:glugglug

Please call me asap!!!

206-852-5566