Emblaze has been developing media streaming technology for over a decade and first unveiled its technology to the public in a live video streaming broadcast from the White House during Easter, 1998.
Emblaze’s Live Streaming technology allows users to send live or pre-recorded audio and video to other devices, saves on data traffic, does not require devoted streaming servers, and allows reliable streaming even through firewalls. Emblaze’s notice to Microsoft includes an offer to license Microsoft under Emblaze’s patented technology. The notice requires Microsoft to respond by 15 March, 2010.
This notice to Microsoft follows an Emblaze notice to Apple Inc. that the same patent is infringed by Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming Application intended for use in Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices as well as in Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system. The notice to Apple also offered a license under Emblaze’s technology.
Naftali Shani, Chairman of Emblaze, said in the press release, “Emblaze has made substantial investment into research and development to build a rich portfolio of intellectual property over many years. While we are happy to license our technology to third parties, we will vigorously defend our rights and our competitive position.”
Source: Emblaze Ltd.
It warms the cockles of my heart to watch the american justice system at work
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“Take a number, please. Have a seat over there and our lawyer will defeat you in just a few minutes.”
And where have the been the last ten plus years? And what products have they developed that contain their ground breaking tech? LOL
Actually, it sounds like they have not been sitting on this. The technology pertains to things just recently added by both Apple and Microsqish, not to Windows Media or Quicktime as they existed before. This one might be an actual, valid complaint. Amazing!
I agree with dab2. This has the earmarks of a legit claim. Apple or MS may have made enough revs to the system to avoid a guilty verdict. Time will tell.
Wasn’t there some other company a while back that made these same claims in regards to streaming digital video?
“This notice to Microsoft follows an Emblaze notice to Apple Inc. that the same patent is infringed by Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming Application intended for use in Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices as well as in Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system.”
After receiving said notice, Apple buys Lala…
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“”Emblaze has made substantial investment into research and development to build a rich portfolio of intellectual property over many years. While we are happy to license our technology to third parties, we will vigorously defend our rights and our competitive position.“
Let’s hope you do a better job then Apple did with the iPhone!
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Unlike a lot of companies, Emblaze have actually shipped product and I remember testing their Java-based audio streaming product back in the mid/late-Nineties!
If Apple had their IP violated, the same people criticising Emblaze would be all over it. Sometimes, the pendulum goes the other way.
Personally, if Apple believe the suit has merit, I’d pay the £60 million to acquire Emblaze and have done with it.
This company owns “Else”. Check out their soon to be released phone – search “Else Intuition”. Looks pretty interesting. This company has a real product, but maybe they would like to (or need to) do some cross licensing?
This is total BS, and a great example of the problem with software patents.
I remember Emblaze. I worked with them quite a bit in the mid-late 90s. Their technology at the time was “neat” in a way, but severely lacking for mass usage. They had several products related to audio, video and animation that were easy to use before Flash became dominate and enabled some of this.
There was a benefit to firewall-proof HTTP streaming, but not that it did a lot of good at the time anyway. The problem with this being a software patent is that it’s not exactly rocket science, if you want to get through a firewall, you go through HTTP, and there are only so many ways that present themselves to do this.
You shouldn’t be able to patent the obvious.
And the real amusing thing here is that when I said it’s “not exactly rocket science”, I meant that literally. It sort of was actually rocket science. Like most Israeli companies at the time, their technology came from or was the result of military investments by the US government. In other words, US tax dollars (some of which was collected by Microsoft and Apple) were spent on this kind of technology in Israel, and now because of our screwed up patent laws, this company is now years later coming back to the US to collect more money through litigation.
Macslut…
I understand all of that, but what is obvious now with the benefit of hindsight and what was obvious then are two separate things: the entire point of leveraging intellectual property is investing in development prior to there being an exploitable market.
Emblaze did that. They may have done it partially with the indirect support of US taxpayers money, but they IPOd on one of the London markets back in the same timeframe that you and I refer to, so there is also private money in there as well.
At the end of the day, either the defendants buy licenses or everyone lawyers up and they make their cases in front of a court. Lets hope Apple makes the right choice.
Apple’s Quicktime Streaming Server has been around for more then 10 years and was out before 1998 so I’m sure that Quicktime stream server is prior art to Emblaze’s Patent.