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Technology Stocks : IATV-ACTV Digital Convergence Software-HyperTV -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jmanvegas who wrote (4536)	6/4/1999 5:01:00 PM
From: Mike Fredericks	Respond to of 13157

Thanks Mike for your views. Wouldn't MSFT's proposed client server software for interactive TV come into conflict with IATV's patents? Can't tell you as I haven't seen any technical details. But I will tell you two things. 1) In a country of innovators, people are always finding ways to improve technology. It's quite possible that another company will invent something better than what IATV has which would not be protected by IATV's patents. I hope that the company that finds the better technology is IATV :-). But other companies want to get into this area and there is much $$$ being spent trying to find ways of doing it. 2) I have no idea how easy it will be to defend these patents. I am not a patent attorney so I may be completely off base. But someone somewhere patented e-commerce. That one will never hold up. The 93 year old guys running the patent office in Washington DC wouldn't know a computer if it bit them in the butt, so they just hand out patents left and right. The Wolzien process involves some method of having Servers push internet data to a client (IE client does not actively request the data). However it is not clear to me that this means that no other company can use server push. I don't think IATV can completely lock that up, because server push is an idea that lots of people used before IATV and Wolzien. So if someone tries to server push the exact way Wolzien describes it, the patent may stand up. If they come up with a different way, I don't think the patent will protect IATV. Hence, you'll note that IATV has said that they do not intend on fighting about these things in court (they may very well lose). Instead, they're going to focus on licensing the technology to others. If they do this, they get licensing revenues, and neither side has to pay lawyers. This may be cheaper for a company than fighting the patent. -Mike