If they chose to do so, Acacia Research could now say they’re doing business with New York’s mayor: Acacia has signed Bloomberg.com and The Bloomberg Professional service, which are owned by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, to a license for Acacia’s controversial streaming media patent group, Digital Media Transmission.
Acacia announced the licensing September 7, a deal covering non-live audio and video content accessible over the Bloomberg corporate Website and The Bloomberg Professional service, the latter available 24/7 online to what Acacia calls over 260,000 professionals in over 125 countries.
Bloomberg has become one of the top financial news and investor tools/data services in the world in the past decade. Company representatives were unavailable for comment when reached by AVNOnline.com before this story went to press.
Acacia executive vice president Robert Berman said the company was thrilled with the Bloomberg licensing deal, the 175th DMT licensing agreement the company has signed since it began enforcing the patent group seriously almost two years ago. “We said in the beginning that the adult entertainment industry was only one industry that we would be focusing on,” he told AVNOnline.com. “Since that time, we have continued to sign licenses with many other industries. And we plan on continuing to do so in the future.”
New Destiny/Homegrown Video chief Spike Goldberg – who is co-leading an adult Internet challenge to the DMT patent group in federal court – was unavailable for comment before this story went to press. That fight took a much-commented-upon turn in mid-July, when U.S. District Judge James Ware handed down a tentative Markman order holding that some of the claim terms in the DMT patent group were undefinable, while others could be definable by Acacia’s lights.
Motions for a summary judgment of invalidity of the DMT patent group will be heard December 2. That date was set during a mid-August conference call between the two sides.
Later in August, a federal appeals court upheld a September 2002 lower court ruling that Sony and several other television set makers could not be called infringers of an Acacia V-chip patent under the so-called doctrine of equivalence – a patent law doctrine in which differences between the setmakers’ blocking devices and the SoundView device are proven insubstantial.
Acacia acquired that patent when it bought the company that already held it, SoundView, earlier in the decade, and began launching patent infringement claims almost at once, with over a dozen setmakers paying one-time licensing fees and helping Acacia earn an early reputation, according to one newspaper report, for profit by litigation.
