The news this week is Altnet's patent infringement letter to P2P developers, including me. See below for excerpt. Some coverage and responses in P2Pnet - 1, 2, 3, 4.

TIMELINE: Altnet claims it acquired these patents in 1999, announced it would defend the patents in June 2003, sued RIAA and others in September 2004, and now has added its fellow P2P developers in January 2005.

I believe the patents are worthless and serve only PR purposes. The lengthy delays signal that Altnet is not aggressively supporting the patents, which supports my belief. So the question is why send out this letter now? What is their true objective? Perhaps the Brilliant Digital parent needs to show its support in their quest to land additional funding. Any ideas out there?

I write on behalf of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Inc. ("BDE") and Altnet, Inc. ("Altnet"), the exclusive licensees for use in peer-to-peer computing of U.S. Patent No. 5,978,791, entitled "Data Processing System Using Substantially Unique Identifiers to Identify Data Items, Whereby Identical Data Items Have the Same Identifiers" ("the '791 Patent") and U.S. Patent No. 6,415,280 B1 entitled "Identifying and Requesting Data In Network Using Identifiers Which Are Based On Contents of Data" ("the '280 Patent") (collectively the "Data Distribution Patents"). ...

Based upon our investigation, we believe that other peer-to-peer applications, including applications offered by your company, use the technology claimed in the Data Distribution Patents for identifying, accessing, and distributing data items between computers. Accordingly, we believe that your company requires a license from BDE and Altnet to continue practicing the '791 and '280 Patents with your company's peer-to-peer application.

Marc Freedman
RazorPop, developer of TrustyFiles, the leading multiple network P2P file sharing software
Are you a major entertainment company or marketer? Then you need BrandedP2P.
Are you an independent artist or small content provider? Check out the Do-It-Yourself P2P Street Team.