Tim, It isn't my intention to flame you, but has anyone here actually read and studied the patent? Have you? I haven't. Someone said they had a copy? Let's hear a listing of what the actual patent claims are before we create a defense.
I would guess that none of the technologies you mention violate the patent or else Rockwell would be doing what Philips or Apple or Intel or IBM is doing. Making money on it. BTW - I don't think any of these technologies have been streaming from HTTP hosts for that long. The net was pretty much useless for this stuff in 1996. That's only 6 years ago. When was this Rockwell patent issued? More importantly, when was it applied for AND when was it invented? That's what makes a difference in US patent law. Before we make up reasons why this patent isn't valid, someone needs to actually read the darn thing. Patents get thrown out all the time, after being issued, when someone presents prior art to the Patent Office that shows it shouldn't have been issued and the patent officers agree. Until then this is just wasted bandwidth. Of course, if you just want to rant, I'm up for that too. ;-) Mark -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:linux-audio-dev-admin@;music.columbia.edu]On Behalf Of Tim Goetze Sent: Monday, November 11, 2002 4:30 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Gigasampler vs Halion PR war Steve Harris wrote: >Prior art doesn't seem to be very useful in defending against patents for >some reason (IANAL of course). The recent British Telecom v's W3C fiasco >was won on the grounds that the BT patent's system operated in a different >way to the Web, rather than because of prior art (which there is plenty >of). otoh, a patent needs to express a new idea afaik. the technique of buffering before playback is applied to 'slow' data providers on a regular basis -- all the .mp{1-4}, .ra, .mov, .avi, .swf etc players do exactly the same thing when playing from a http host, and they've been doing this for a long time now. in this light, claiming the patented idea is either original or new is nonsensical. tim
