Whether or not a human operator can be considered part of a transmission system could prove a key to whether Acacia Research Corp.'s streaming media patent claims endure a legal challenge by several adult Internet companies.
So said attorney John Singer of the challengers' team after court May 18, day one of a scheduled three-day session in the pre-trial Markman process. "What's going on is, Acacia is trying to claim that human beings can be part of a transmission system," he said, "because the patent fails to disclose permissible non-human elements as part of the transmission system. We believe the failure of the patent to include that stuff renders the patent invalid."
The two sides wrestled over the issue in court, toward the end of a day devoted otherwise to arguing the differing interpretations of the element claim terms pertinent to the patent group Acacia calls Digital Media Transmission.
Acacia's legal team insisted that technical definitions of transmission systems – specifically, those drawn by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers – include human operators, while the legal team for the challengers insisted that a transmission system – or any kind of technical or mechanical system – does not by definition include human operators.
""We do not define a car to include the driver merely because the driver operates the car," said Singer, one of the team representing New Destiny/Homegrown Video, VideoSecrets, and several other adult Internet companies, before U.S. District Judge Joseph Ware late in the afternoon.
Acacia team attorney Roderick Dorman accused the challengers during the court session of trying to claim non-infringement on the human factor's grounds in spite of the definition to which Acacia holds, that a transmission system and a receiving system each factors in the human operator. Singer accused Acacia of contradicting earlier court presentations by "brazenly tr(ying) to import (the) operator into the transmission system."
Dorman said after court he was reluctant to comment on the case outside court. "I think it's a bad idea for a lawyer to comment, you know, about pending motions and pending issues," he said. But he praised Ware's continuing conduct of the proceedings, as both sides have since the Markman process began, especially Ware's apparent flair for inquiry without implying an inquisition.
"I think we have a bright, thoughtful judge," he said. "And I think he's going to work through these issues and we're going to get to the legally correct result. He engages in a dialogue and he really works to understand this stuff."
The two sides otherwise spent the day discussing three other claim terms – the sequence of addressable data blocks, compressed data storing means, and storing the compressed, formatted, and sequenced blocks as a file. Yet to be addressed during this three-day session, which resumes today at 9 a.m., are identification encoders, sequence encoders, popularity codes, a digital compressor, a transceiver, and a temporary storage device.
