2002 video streaming patent holder sues Amazon and Twitch Media solutions company BSD Crown, best known for video encoding products as well as building Android smartphones in the Noughties, has filed a lawsuit against Amazon and livestreaming offshoot Twitch, claiming the pair infringed its patent. The Israeli company, formerly known as Emblaze, previously sued both Apple and …
How these things are being patented?
Anyone facing the problem would have arrived at it using common sense. Someone who merely was one of the first having to solve it should have never been granted a patent.
The whole business of patents is basically made for the rich to profiteer and should be scrapped.
Patents usually involve lots of R&D spend.
Not sure how this is relevant. Any work needs R&D spend. For larger startups VCs often have as a requirement that the start up file for patents in order to get funding, solely because they hope if the adventure goes tits up, they can do some patent trolling to recoup their loses.
There is absolutely no reason why patents should exist.
Why spend the R&D cash if you can just copy some other firms product?
Why would the other firm develop the product if you are just going to copy it?
Patents exist for a reason, and that reason is to encourage development.
No IP protection = no reason to create any IP = no R&D = nothing new
"For larger startups VCs often have as a requirement that the start up file for patents in order to get funding, solely because they hope if the adventure goes tits up, they can do some patent trolling to recoup their loses."
There are several problems in this. The first is that it's not the reason the VCs are asking for patents. They're hoping to make money from the idea, and if someone starts to copy it, they'd like to block them. Hence their attempt to get any patentable (or not) thing patented to set up roadblocks for the competition. Sometimes that's valid because the innovation is really a new invention, sometimes the applications will either be so obviously bad that they drop it or will be rejected, and sometimes they should be rejected but aren't, but that's the motivation.
Patent trolling is another issue. If you have a valid patent, then defending your patent rights isn't trolling. There are times when I dislike what can be done with a legitimate patent that's not being used well, but it's designed for a good reason. Trolling is a problem when the patents are invalid, but for the same reason that granting invalid patents in the first place is a problem. The solution is better oversight from the patent offices instead of approving anything.
While most software patents are bunkum, I don't believe you know what HLS is, if you think it's a solution anyone "would have arrived at it using common sense," or how many competing designs and protocols it eventually beat out. HTTP streaming, and streaming in general, was still an incredibly hard nut to crack that companies were bashing their heads against for at least a decade at the time, and a number of wildly differing schemes were created to try to solve it.
Over time the field has winnowed down to RTMP and HLS because they were the best and most fully-developed technologies out of the whole field. RTMP's licensing fees were significantly higher, so HLS got a lot more popular. There's also SRT/RIST which are more recent patent-free FOSS protocols, but how far they'll go remains to be seen. (Especially since HLS goes out of patent later this year -- which I'm sure is what prompted this lawsuit.)
They haven't patented http, they've patented a specific approach to using it to stream live video. Very short form it seems to say you upload it in fixed-length, indexed slices, so the client (with a slight lag) can pull each slice in the right order, catch up when it loses bits, and so forth. If bandwidth isn't sufficient to stream it properly, the slicing means that you get choppy video, but you do still get it.
You can read it here.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6389473B1/en
I obviously have no idea if it was evolutionary or non-obvious in 2002, but from dim recall of those ancient days video streaming wasn't a thing people did much.
It was obvious in 2002. In the late 90s we (in academia) used CUseeme to live stream events, and we'd had the WWW for a while at that point, so it was obvious to include video streaming in a web browser experience. This is a variant of 'doing it on a computer', 'doing it over http' hell, did someone not patent 'selling things over http'?
Acorn (them of the ARM fame), were trialing streaming video in the late 90s.
Unfortunatly it was a bit ahead of it's time and around the same time that Acorn was dissolved to get out the ARM shares.
This post has been deleted by its author
Very short form it seems to say you upload it in fixed-length, indexed slices, so the client (with a slight lag) can pull each slice in the right order, catch up when it loses bits, and so forth.
Sounds like you're describing TCP.
I would guess it more focused on this:
Amazon.com and Twitch knew, or should have known, that the adaptive multibit rate technology of the '473 patent was foundational to the Amazon and Twitch streaming systems.
And that is probably more related to monitoring the stream and adjusting the quality to match the available bandwidth. IE. if 720p is jittering, then drop the quality down to 480p until the network recovers.
From the patent:
12. A method according to claim 11, wherein downloading the sequence comprises determining a data bandwidth of the network between the server and the client computer and selecting one of the quality levels responsive to the determined bandwidth.
And the part of me that learned the OSI model is silently crying at this sentence:
Preferably, the one or more client computers download the encode sequence using an Internet download protocol, most preferably HTTP or alternatively, UDP or RTP.
Not a joke but related.
In the UK, the book "spycatcher" was banned when it came out in the '80s
I had to order a copy from a US bookshop (IIRC BookSoup in LA) who posted it to me (they advertised in Private Eye magazine classifieds as a way of publicising themselves)
A long time since I had to last order a physical item to discover information that was subject to censorship, now its easy to find stories of govt / govt agencies dubious practices online
Not sure if there are any statutes of limitations, but they probably sent a desist letter a number of years before expiry in 2019. It is likely that was ignored, so BSD Crown have waited until the patent had run its full course, maximising the time the infringement was happening (or wasn't, depending on the outcome of the case). All because the patent has now expired doesn't alter the fact that Amazon was using the patented technology before expiry and possibly should have been paying royalties for the privilege.
It tells me nothing. I even looked them up to try to find an explanation of why they called it that, and I've still got nothing. Their website lists four previous names, some of which suggests they're a computer-based company, and a different page suggests they're in the food distribution business and mentions no technology products.
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