The second session of a Markman hearing - in which a judge hears evidence and definitions before determining asserted patent claims as law matters – will be held April 9 in U.S. District Court here in the battle between Acacia Research Corp. and a number of adult Internet companies over Acacia's streaming media patent claims, which are collectively known as Digital Media Transmission (DMT).
Acacia executive vice president Robert Berman was unavailable for comment before this story went to press. But New Destiny/Homegrown Video chief Spike Goldberg – whose company leads a group of adult Internet businesses challenging the Acacia patents – said he expects the court to "continue to hear a lot about how this is a patent that we're not infringing.
"I'm excited to go to tomorrow's hearing," Goldberg said, "because it's one step closer to getting this whole ordeal over with. I look forward to having the terms of these patents clarified."
The first session in the Markman process was held February 9. At that session, as AVN.com reported, Acacia's legal team asserted that the "novel architecture" of the DMT patents was its "combination of all the elements," as attorney Roderick Dornan phrased it during one of his presentations. "There is no prior art that includes all the elements together."
That session was planned to cover four claims, but was spent covering only one. Berman told AVN.com at the time that he did not expect any ruling on the issues covered by Markman until the end of the summer.
Attorneys for New Destiny/Homegrown Video and its co-respondents, who are all challenging Acacia's DMT patent claims, claimed Acacia wants to "harmonize" existing technologies, looking not for "novel architecture" but user convenience - the user, they asserted, being able to control when and where he or she could view or hear streaming media.
The Markman process is named for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that held that the limits of a patent "must be known for the protection of the patentee, the encouragement of the inventive genius of others, and the assurance that the subject of the patent will be dedicated ultimately to the public... Otherwise, a zone of uncertainty... would discourage invention."
Acacia has asserted five patents covering a reputed 121 claims in a group the company calls Digital Media Transmission. The company has been trying to get licensing agreements with numerous adult Internet companies for over a year, signing their 118th such deal in March with Playboy Enterprises.
