Spotify smacked with patent suits in US and Netherlands

US company PacketVideo has filed patent infringement lawsuits against Spotify with courts in the Netherlands and the US. In the Dutch courts, PacketVideo will claim the Swedish music streaming service violated European patents belonging to PacketVideo dating back to the mid-1990s. It will argue the same in respect of a US …

[scarshapedstar]

Yikes

I stream music from my own hard drive. Seems like I'm infringing, too.

[Ian Michael Gumby]

Nope.

Your hard drive is connected to your PC by an internal cable so you're not streaming.

Were to say that you were streaming from your NAS to your PC or wi-fi connected lap top? Maybe.

But you're not a commercial organization.

At the same time, I would have to argue that its a trivial and obvious patent.

[LauRoman]

WTF

If i took out the word music i could swear they tried to patent internet protocols.

[Anonymous Coward]

They have…

… for all intents and purposes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_Transport_Protocol

among others.

[Deaths Pirate]

... technically speaking ...

A module could be software based.

[Bill Neal]

...misuse of its patents

why didn't they go after pandora?

[Destroy All Monsters]

Bets! 5 to 1 on...

1) Will be laughed out of court in the NL

2) Will be awarded gazillion of damages in the US

[Deaths Pirate]

... get real

Surely this means ANY streaming media sites are liable to a lawsuit, iTunes next? Pandora? Get freaking real, this patent should never have been granted as its way too broad. Companies need to stop suing each other and wasting the courts time.

[ParaSitius]

Good grief

Think of the poor lawyers, whatever would they do without these patent battles?

[Charles Augustus Milverton]

Dial a disc

Apart from the music being digitised, that patent sounds a lot like the Post Office's Dial A Disc service. Anyone here old enough to remember dialling 160 to hear abysmal quality music (it always seemed to Free singing Alright Now whenever I tried it).

http://www.lightstraw.co.uk/ate/main/ris/16.html

[Jeff 11]

LOL

What's bigger?

a) The number of dollars in damages the trolls are seeking

b) The number of articles of prior art used to invalidate the patent

[Anonymous Coward]

Prior art?

Hmm, that might be harder to find than one might think, seeing how this patent goes back into the 1990s, at which time streaming music and so on wasn't exactly common...

[Michael Wojcik]

Streaming in the '90s

Streaming music to consumers wasn't big business in the 90s, but there should still be plenty of prior art. "Push technology" and "publish-subscribe" content delivery were big buzzwords by mid-decade, and there was no shortage of research and experimental systems.

Plenty of websites had (typically god-awful) musical accompaniment; that was often in the form of MIDI files as MP3 (MPEG-2 Level III audio) was only standardized in 1994, and PCM formats (WAV, AIFF, etc) took too much bandwidth. But whatever the format, delivering music data over HTTP and having it play in the browser was close enough to "streaming" to serve as prior art for this patent, IMHO.

The original Timidity MIDI-player browser plugin was created in '95, for example. That's the same year this patent was filed. And I don't believe Timidity was the first music plugin.