RSSBurst Countersues Apple Over Patents
By Nate Mook | Published April 18, 2006, 11:46 AM
Following through on a statement made in January, patent holder Burst.com announced Tuesday it had filed a countersuit against Apple Computer for infringing on four of the company's streaming media patents. Apple filed a lawsuit in January to preemptively invalidate Burst's patents.
At issue are the iTunes Music Store, iTunes software and Apple's QuickTime Streaming products, which Burst claims infringe on U.S. Patents 4,963,995; 5,995,705; 5,057,932 and 5,164,839. The company had attempted to settle with Apple two years ago, but talks broke down and Burst threatened to sue late last year.
Burst says it, "requests in its counterclaims that Apple pay a reasonable royalty for Apple’s infringing products and services, and also seeks an injunction against further infringement." The April 17 court filing alleges that Burst's technologies have been "essential" to Apple's success.
“We have a responsibility to protect our patents and to seek a fair return for the many years and tremendous investment that we have made in developing Burst technology and patents," said Burst.com chairman and CEO Richard Lang.
The company has hired four separate law firms to aid its legal efforts.
Burst is no stranger to litigation with large tech companies. Last year, the company settled with Microsoft for $60 million over allegations that Redmond used trade information obtained from several meetings with Burst to develop software to stream audio and video over the Internet.
Lang says that Apple may have incorrectly assumed Microsoft would help to invalidate the patents and avoid paying royalties.
The American patent system is beyond ridiculous. It's one thing to come up with a good idea and patent it, hoping you will soon be using it in some product to make money and therefore want to pretect your intellectual property. It's quite another to file these vague, ambiguous patents knowing full well you will never have a physical product based on said patent. Instead you sit back and wait for a big company trying to innovate to accidentally (or not) use some method (remotely) similar to your patent and then sue the pants off them. RIM and the Blackberry fiasco is a prime example of this. Another good example would be Rambus, who sat around in meetings with other RAM technology leaders, stole their ideas, patented them behind their backs, and now want royalties from every RAM manufacturer. Every day we see more and more of these useless companies holding some random patent and it's just really getting out of hand.
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|has anyone read those patents? they are almost all identical... over a 20 year period.
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|Patents just protect people who sit around dreaming all day. It's a con and the money will just be used to pay lawyers to find another winnable patent suit. This does nothing to encourage innovation which is the main reason for a patent/copyright system in the first place.
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|patent... lawsuit... patent... lawsuit...
40-30.
patent... lawsu - OUT
Deuce.
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|Ha! That's an interesting point of view. But, yes, sadly true.
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|suing apple ??
it's a good thing :)
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|Yes, and all i have to say is I hope these cases all go in Burst's favor!
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|Err, why? To encourage more of these ridiculous lawsuits? It's a shame people now know that it's easier to sue someone in the US than it is to actually make your own money.
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