what happened to the company that owned movie downloads?

[marcjacob]

i remember this company that registered the copywrite to the idea of downloading movies, then wanted 10% of anything adult sites made. anyone know what im talking about? what happened in the end?

[gaybucks_chip]

I think you're talking about Acacia, who bought a patent to streaming video from somebody that managed to convince the patent office to issue it, and then was trying to hold up webmasters for a % of their income.

I haven't been following it all that closely, but I remember hearing that there were some decisions that effectively made it either difficult or impossible for Acacia to be able to enforce that (defective) patent. But they (and a number of other sleazy companies) have been buying up other ridiculous patents and extorting money from people based on other technologies.

This sort of thing won't go completely away until there's a major overhaul in patent laws and the patent examination process in the US.