The language of adult entertainment won't be stricken from court documents or testimony, as a number of adult Internet companies fight off Acacia Media Technologies patent infringement litigation, a federal judge ruled the day before Acacia signed a licensing deal with LodgeNet, a major adult video-on-demand provider to hotels.
U.S. District Judge Alicemarie H. Stotler denied a motion filed by Homegrown Video/New Destiny Media to remove all language of adult entertainment, which Homegrown had sought to strike for fear of prejudicing the court or a jury.
"I think it would be impossible for the defendants to hide from the court what it is that they do," said Acacia senior vice president Rob Berman of the May 12 ruling. But Homegrown president Spike Goldberg said the ruling wasn't exactly a setback for his side.
Homegrown and Videosecrets are leading a group of ten companies in fighting Acacia's bid to force them to pay royalties for a group of streaming media patents Acacia calls Digital Media Technology.
Stotler ruled that it wasn't clear that adult entertainment language or references "could have no possible bearing" on the litigation. But she all but said in addition that the adult entertainment language should not be used prejudicially, either. "The language was descriptive and not redundant, immaterial, or scandalous," she wrote.
"We weren't unhappy," said Goldberg. "The judge pretty much let it be known that it wasn't going to be about the adult (content)."
Meanwhle, the Acacia-LodgeNet deal runs from July of this year through January 2011. Terms including royalty rates and schedules could not be disclosed due to a confidentiality agreement between the two companies that's covered by federal regulations, but Berman did say the deal could be worth millions to Acacia by the time the nine-year deal expires.
LodgeNet now services 5,700 hotel properties with 960,000 rooms total. Acacia said LodgeNet now deploys digital entertainment to 300,000 rooms and "plans to have digital services installed in over 40 percent of its 960,000 rooms (about 384,000) by the end of 2003."
Under terms of the deal, LodgeNet will be required to pay Acacia quarterly and within 30 days of the end of each calendar quarter, beginning in the third quarter of this year, and based on how many actual rooms LodgeNet serviced each calendar quarter.
Acacia sued 39 adult Internet companies over DMT technology earlier this year, with eight of those companies settling with Acacia out of court. The ten fighting the litigation argue that Acacia wants to enforce a patent that can't be enforced, since the technology in question had existed already and was being used long enough before the patents in question were applied for, while those who claimed to create the patents' elements knew but didn't acknowledge that in their applications. Acacia has said that argument is all but a standard line of defense in patent infringement litigation.
