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Apple enters legal battle with Burst.com
January 6, 2006 -
Burst, Microsoft agree to settle suit
March 11, 2005
After being approached by Burst.com in late 2004, Apple had filed for a declaratory judgment in January that it isn't infringing on Burst's patents, but Burst is going ahead with its lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco. Burst is asking for royalties as well as an injunction, it said in a press release.
Burst has developed software that helps companies speed up the delivery of audio and video files over a network. The company was involved in a similar patent infringement dispute with Microsoft last year that ended with a $60 million settlement and a Microsoft license to the Burst technology.
Apple and Burst had held discussions over the past year regarding the patents but never came to any licensing agreement. Apple doesn't believe the patents are valid, it said in January.
Richard Lang, co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Burst, said the company's patented technology involves the delivery of music or video over the Internet "faster than real-time." A television program over a broadcast network is delivered in real-time, meaning an hour-long show is delivered over the course of an hour. But Burst holds patents that cover sending an hour-long video across a network in a few minutes, in addition to other technology involved in delivering that video or audio content, he said.
Three of the four patents at issue in the new lawsuit are the same as the ones involved in the Microsoft suit, Lang said. An Apple representative did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
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article from The Onion? Strangely prescient.
Based on the claims from this blurb, that Burst patented delivery
of media fast than realtime, this sounds amazing. I've been
inspired to pursue a patent outlining my plans to use 'a web
server' to send vast amounts of 'written words' to a recipient in
less time than those same words could be 'read aloud'.
Anyone with me?
they don't have a patent at all (I hold a few out of date patents on
stuff digitally, so I know it's about the one and zeroes and proving
they do whatever, whenever).
Besides, why don't they sue anybody who downloads anything
digitally, since that's the general assumption by their whining.
think it would be simply smarter to take a look at the Burst
patents and see what they actually cover. This is a networking
technology. The idea is simple but the implementation is not.
Media data is bursty by nature, which means there are times
when it fills the entire pipe and other times when it requires very
little bandwidth. The point here is not to defy the laws of
physics but simply to keep the pipe filled 100 percent of the
time by pre-sending data during periods of lower use. That's
the idea and it makes possible Apple's "skip protection" feature
in QuickTime. But the Burst patents go quite a bit further and
cover the implemtation of such an idea. How do you decide
which bits to send ahead? How do you store them? How do you
reorder them? How do you monitor line conditions to know how
much data you can send ahead? There is a Burst application,
you know, to do all this and it is in its 3.0 version. So read the
patents, please.