EFF asks for help defeating podcast patent troll - gonzalezwhoustinity

A 1996 podcasting plain is in the crosshairs of ii digital rights groups, which are hoping the public leave help them get the patent invalidated.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, partnering with the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard University's Berkman Focus for Internet and Society, is asking the semipublic to identify examples of ideas similar to podcasting that were published before Oct. 2, 1996.

A Texas caller, Personal Audio, holds a 2012 patent for a arrangement for dispersive media pleased representing episodes in a serialized sequence and a related 1996 patent for an sound political program player including a high-voltage program excerption comptroller.

In April, Personal Audio filed lawsuits declaratory its podcasting patent against NBC and CBS, and in January, it filed lawsuits against ACE Broadcasting Network, HowStuffWorks.com and TogiEntertainment.

Personal Audio didn't immediately answer an email seeking comment on the Make out's intended dispute to its patents.

The EFF and the Cyberlaw Clinic are targeting the patent victimisation a new legal tool for challenging existing patents at the U.S. Patent of invention and Earmark Office, called the inter partes review. The new challenge was part of the America Invents Act, passed by Congress in 2011.

The Get laid is request the podcasting community to pass on evidence of podcasting-typewrite technologies that existed before late 1996, and the aggroup is also interrogatory for financial backin to fight the plain. The EFF's goal is to final stage Attribute Audio's lawsuit threats, aforesaid Daniel Nazer, an EFF staff attorney.

"A podcaster operative outgoing of a garage is unlikely to have the financial resources to fight a lawsuit," he said in an email. "Patent trolls like Personal Sound know this and use the threat of ruinous litigation costs as a weapon."

Crowdsourcing is a good way to get ideas on questionable prior art, "peculiarly those that were involved in pioneering early Cyberspace media," he added."The chronicle of the early net is in a lot of different hands and minds — a public call for prior fine art can find material we would otherwise miss."

Nazer discounted a suggestion that the patent could be legitimate.

"Temporary internet radio was pioneered in the very early 1990s," he aforementioned. "Given the breadth of the patent's claims there may be many other kinds of media to consider equally anterior art."

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/452148/eff-targets-podcasting-patent-for-invalidation.html

Posted by: gonzalezwhoustinity.blogspot.com