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Burst Sues Apple for iTunes, iPod, Quicktime Patents

As a serious question though...

I was reading on burst.com's website where they have thier reply to Apple's counter-claim:
http://burst.com/new/newsevents/Burst.com Apple Answer and Counterclaim.pdf

here are my thoughts:

Ok, so perhaps burst was working on this stuff way back when. They did a smart thing and patented their work while it was still in it's early stages. If someone wants to use their techonology so that they don't have to use R&D money to come up with their own stuff, thats great. Thats why there are patents for it. However, when the environment they are basing their patent on becomes more commonplace (ie, fast networking connections and "faster than realtime" delivery of data) and someone (Apple) wants to create their own technology, I believe that is outside of the scope of patent law. If Apple made their own content-delivery system technology based on commonplace technology of the day and did so without "stealing" burst's ideas then burst has no case.

If someone who knows this stuff can correct me, please do. This was just from my poor poor "knowledge" of patent laws.
 
kalisphoenix said:
On a similar vein, a friend of mine yesterday told me he was minoring in Marketing. I asked him just to kill himself now and save the rest of us.
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this is sort of hypocritical, coming from a mac fan. apple is a master of marketing. its marketing is one reason you--and I, we--covet its products, believe it or not.

terry
 
drewyboy said:
I've decided to patent taking a dump. Therefore, if you need to take a crap... a royalty fee of 5 dollars per crap will be enforced,
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Nope, someone already patented doing the #2 AND the #1, in fact I'm trying to reach a settlement with them on the #1, it's been weeks now without going and it feels like I'm going to explode.

Counterfit said:
A: Natural processes (breathing) cannot be patented
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Thank you Captain Obvious. :rolleyes: Next thing I know you'll be telling me I cant patent a pendulum that never stops because it swings with the rotation of the earth!
 
SciTeach said:
The claims cover patents involving "the delivery of music or video over the Internet 'faster than real-time.'"


Let me get this straight. If you are actually delivering music or video at 'faster than real-time', then one must be able to send information at faster than the speed of light. Explained by Einstein's theory of relativity, as an object approaches the speed of light, its' mass (even electrons) increase to an infinite amount. Therefore, the data would be so massive, it would completely fill all the hard drives of the world.:eek:

Maybe Burst has found a way to travel faster than light. They're really a company from the future; came back in time to sue Apple (& MS) now, because they're not any lawyers in the future.:D
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ROFL :p :D
Nice analogy here. I guess faster than realtime is simply downloading. Like you go on a website with a quicktime movie on it and the dark grey bar wils up faster than you can watch the video. But really, such things have been around for years, i.e you usually download an eMail faster than you can read it (spam doesn't count), right? I'd like Apple to sue Burst and win. ;)

I have a black hole on my computer. That solves the massive data problem, the data just disapperas in it. Windows is really good in disposing of data. ;)
 
kalisphoenix said:
On a similar vein, a friend of mine yesterday told me he was minoring in Marketing. I asked him just to kill himself now and save the rest of us.
Click to expand...

But before he killed himself, he could return the Bill Hicks DVDs you've been cribbing your routines from.
 
Aztechian said:
Ok, so perhaps burst was working on this stuff way back when. They did a smart thing and patented their work while it was still in it's early stages. If someone wants to use their techonology so that they don't have to use R&D money to come up with their own stuff, thats great. Thats why there are patents for it. However, when the environment they are basing their patent on becomes more commonplace (ie, fast networking connections and "faster than realtime" delivery of data) and someone (Apple) wants to create their own technology, I believe that is outside of the scope of patent law. If Apple made their own content-delivery system technology based on commonplace technology of the day and did so without "stealing" burst's ideas then burst has no case.
Click to expand...

I could not have said it better myself.
 
Reading through the claims I found that Burst in 1990(91) went public with their Patents.. these are some of their patents that they think Apple is infringing on:

1)Digital compression and sending of files through cables, telephones or Microwaves faster than the user could listen/read or watch.. IE:Faster than Real Time(Burst.coms catchphrase)

2)That the Faster than Real Time content could be saved to compact disk, hard drive or RAM. Also a brief mention of possible portable devices.

3)Burst claims that Apple employee's in 1990 were very interested in their contents/patents and that iTunes, Quicktime Player and ipods are a direct result of that.

4)QuickTime Player violates some of their patents.. in Apple's marketing of Quicktime Player they have a line that basicly says: Quicktime streams internet video/audio to consumers faster than real time. by buffering data ahead of what the consumer can watch or listen to.

Personally I think these claims are a bunch of *****!! Burst.com's patents are so general and OLD that most of them should be obsolete by now.

Bursts patents allow them to sue anybody whos downloaded ANYTHING from the internet.. they also allow them sue every computer manufacture, hard drive manufacture, RAM manufacture and a lot of programmers for facilitating in breaking their patents.
 
kalisphoenix said:
On a similar vein, a friend of mine yesterday told me he was minoring in Marketing. I asked him just to kill himself now and save the rest of us.
Click to expand...

Hey we're not that evil! or atleast..not as evil as lawyers. We just cheapen & homogenise everything untill it's ready for mass consumption...ok maybe we are that evil :p
 
Photorun said:
Thank you Captain Obvious. :rolleyes: Next thing I know you'll be telling me I cant patent a pendulum that never stops because it swings with the rotation of the earth!
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that actually is a good idea; you should consider it a patent :rolleyes:
IMHO, it should stop eventually, but if you find it non-stop, should go for it.
 
Where does it stop?

Okay, so maybe I'm reaching, but I think Apple should file a discrimination lawsuit. I mean, what about Yahoo, Google, Sony, Napster, etc. What about Cingular and Verizon, who stream tunes to phones over microwave? This seems like they are discriminating against Apple and M$. Or perhaps there is more thatn meets the eye here...
 
CaptainHaddock said:
"I am embarrassed to be a capitalist."

You don't have to be. Software patents are a government-granted monopoly designed to prevent competition and restrict the free market. That's fascism (national socialism), not capitalism.
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uh, obviously you've never taken a history of capitalism class. the intent behind patents--believe it or not--is actually to encourage innovation, which is the the real driving force of capitalism. without patents, companies have no incentive to spend money on R&D since everyone else would be free to copy their innovation. and without innovation, everyone would be selling the same old crap. and when everyone is selling the same old crap, no one's making any profit. except for the landowners...but that's for another time.
 
spencecb said:
This is silly. And MS probably paid them because they didn't want to fight another battle. It's probably easier for them to just pay people off.
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And supplying burst with enough money to go after the others. Its not the first time, MS giving in real fast with just enough cash to continue suing the competitors and giving credibility to the 'infringement'. MS was also one of the first and biggest to pay off SCO, we all know the rest.
 
dongmin said:
uh, obviously you've never taken a history of capitalism class. the intent behind patents--believe it or not--is actually to encourage innovation, which is the the real driving force of capitalism. without patents, companies have no incentive to spend money on R&D since everyone else would be free to copy their innovation. and without innovation, everyone would be selling the same old crap. and when everyone is selling the same old crap, no one's making any profit. except for the landowners...but that's for another time.
Click to expand...
I agree, honestly i don't understand why so many ppl defending apple, what moran will give you 60 million for nothing, especailly we are talking about rich ppl. :confused:
 
rtdunham said:
this is sort of hypocritical, coming from a mac fan. apple is a master of marketing. its marketing is one reason you--and I, we--covet its products, believe it or not.
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This is a remarkable comment. "Apple is the master of marketing".

I think you'll find that this is a recent phenomenon. Throughout most of Apple's existence.... they survived despite terrible marketing.

arn
 
ragland said:
There is plenty of legal precedent to indicate that Apple will have to pay burst and license their technology.

To the post that suggested Burst is out of money...The company paid nearly the entire $60M back to shareholders after the Microsoft lawsuit.

Essentially, the story goes like this, the company has had this technology for a long time and Microsoft did try and sue them but quickly realized they had pretty solid patent protection. Since the technology was so much better than the altenratives, MSFT quickly settled and licensed the product.

There is a rumor that this suit is one of the potential delays related to the video ipod. It is suggested that Apple needs this case to be resolved one way or the other in order to move forward unless of course they come up with something that doesn't infringe.

A little trivia for you...Guess who has been a large equity owner of Burst.com from the beginning?

U2

So it gets way more interesting when you consider that the boys from Ireland, who just happen to have their own U2 Ipod, are part of the negotiations with Steve Jobs. Burst.com did the Zooropa tour video feeds.

Look for something intersting to come out of this.........
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Nice research rag! This is getting more interesting as the day goes on.
Hope it don't hurts me stock :eek:

"Think Alike... BE Different!"
 
spencecb said:
This is silly. And MS probably paid them because they didn't want to fight another battle. It's probably easier for them to just pay people off.
Click to expand...

Actually, Microsoft found itself in a very bad position: Burst demanded that Microsoft should hand over all emails related to Burst technology (which is something a company can demand in a lawsuit), claiming that Microsoft had deliberately ripped them off and the emails would prove this. It turned out that all the relevant emails had been deleted, and that makes a very very bad impression on any judge. If evidence has been destroyed by the defendant, the court can assume that the evidence was actually bad for the defendant.

This doesn't mean at all that Microsoft had actually done anything bad - it just put them in a very awkward position. If Microsoft had been able to produce all relevant emails, and if these emails had shown that Microsoft hadn't tried to do anything they shouldn't, the case would have gone quite differently.

In this case, Apple has acted quite clever: They sued Burst first to invalidate Burst's patents. There is a good chance that Burst's case cannot be handled until Apple's case has gone through (because obviously the question whether Burst's patents are valid or not is extremely relevant to the question whether Apple is infringing on Burst's patents or not), so Apple will not find itself in the same situation as RIM.
 
SciTeach said:
Let me get this straight. If you are actually delivering music or video at 'faster than real-time', then one must be able to send information at faster than the speed of light. Explained by Einstein's theory of relativity, as an object approaches the speed of light, its' mass (even electrons) increase to an infinite amount. Therefore, the data would be so massive, it would completely fill all the hard drives of the world.:eek:
Click to expand...

I think you meant zero mass, not infinite mass. As you approach speed of light, all your mass gets converted to energy.

No, "faster than real-time" means that when I order my song on iTMS today, the song should have appeared on my iPod yesterday. Elementary, really.

On the other hand, it could just mean "buffering"....
 
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