The San Francisco based company claimed to have suffered significant losses and demanded compensation for the ongoing patent infringement.

The original patent at the center of the lawsuit is titled “Media file distribution with adaptive transmission protocols.” It describes a file-sharing system consisting of a file database, a transfer client and a distribution server.

“By making, operating, using and/or selling [uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline] and or other software, BitTorrent has infringed and continues to infringe, contribute to the infringement, or induce the infringement of at least claim 1 of the ’944 patent,” the complaint read.

Judged by a layman’s eye the patent did not appear to apply to BitTorrent, but depending on the judge’s decision the case could have a disastrous impact on the BitTorrent community. More than 100 million people use uTorrent every month, half of all active BitTorrent users in the U.S. and Europe.

Luckily for them, it didn’t go that far.

Last week District Court Judge William Alsup signed a joint motion to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning the case is closed and can’t be refiled in the future. Each party further agreed to bear its own attorney fees and other costs. Additional details on the motivations behind the dismissal were not provided.

BitTorrent Inc. is happy with the outcome but didn’t wish to comment any further on the case.

“We were very pleased that the plaintiff dismissed its case with prejudice,” was all the company’s spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

Tranz-Send Broadcasting Network have also dismissed the case against Kontiki Inc., who it accused of a similar patent violation.

Kontiki offers a media content delivery technology that is hybrid of central servers and P2P transfers. Unlike BitTorrent Inc, Kontiki’s user base mostly consists of businesses who can use the software to stream and distribute video. According to the complaint, this software also infringes on the aforementioned patent.

The dismissal comes as a surprise. Court documents filed two weeks ago show that Tranz-Send anticipated that the case would be heard by a jury during a full trial. BitTorrent and Kontiki on the other hand preferred an early summary judgment and requested compensation for the costs they incurred during the process.

Despite the above and for reasons unknown, all parties eventually decided that dismissing the case was the best option.

Source: Patent Violation Lawsuit Against BitTorrent / uTorrent Dropped

It’s when independent experts say that extending terms hurts the economy and stifles innovation that people should sit up and take notice. All too often though, such experts are ignored because they are just people that know the subject, rather than fund politicians campaign contributions. Moreover, they focus on facts and case histories, rather than vague associations or made-up figures.

Two such experts are Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, economists at the Washington University in St Louis. Boldrin, chairman of the university economics department, points out that what goes by the name ‘Intellectual Property’ is in fact “an intellectual monopoly that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps.”

“From a public policy view, we’d ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether,” says Levine, the John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics. “There’s plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It’s not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright.”

In a short video clip, Levine states that copyright shouldn’t been seen as a charitable act, which is a lesson Commissioner McCreevy needs to learn. Also, he states that Intellectual Monopoly is the more appropriate term, and that the property label is a recently-given propaganda title, a subject Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation has covered in the past.

The views of the economists are presented in their new book, “Against Intellectual Monopoly”, where they suggest that the copyright and patent systems in the US should at least be brought back into line with their constitutional establishment – that of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. In the book, they put the case quite simply – “In the decades to come, sustaining economic progress will depend, more and more, on our ability to progressively reduce and eventually eliminate intellectual monopoly.”

It might be that the Pirate Party has some intellectual support for their positions, and perhaps a Missouri party will soon be in the making.

Source: Economists: Abolish Copyright & Patents to Save the Economy

However, after we published the article, Viralg responded to an email we sent earlier. It appears that they believe that the value of the sale doesn’t necessarily lie in the technology.

This section from the eBay auction gives a clue:

3. If your business is involved in developing and/or selling a P2P program, you can make it better and avoid any problems that this technology can give to your network.

A brief email from Viralg suggests that they feel that a ‘p2p related community’ might want to buy the patents – but why would p2p’ers want them?

Here are some details from the Canadian patent:

1. A method for limiting the use of unauthorized digital content in a content-sharing network in which digital content is distributed as files, wherein each file comprises content information and is associated with characteristic information and verification information, the method comprising:

(a) determining a first file whose content information is copyrighted;

(b) repeatedly distributing a second file in the content-sharing network, wherein the second file is associated with characteristic information and verification information that match the characteristic information and verification information, respectively, of said first file, and wherein the second file comprises content information that does not match the content information of the first file.

It seems that Viralg feel that their patent gives them the monopoly on a particular type of file corruption and that if these patents were bought by a pro-p2p outfit, they could get legal protection if anyone ever tried to use this technique against them.

Viralg told us: “Let say at some P2P related community buy those patent applications… after that no body can’t mess with hash codes…”

Maybe one million p2p’ers will put $1 each for these papers?

Ok, maybe not.

Source: Anti-Piracy Company Wants to Sell Patents to Protect P2P