Acacia Technologies is used loosely to refer to Acacia Research Corporation and its subsidiary Acacia Media Technologies. The company specializes in acquiring and enforcing patents. The company controls over 30 patent portfolios in a wide variety of media, internet and technological industries. In business, a subsidiary is a company controlled by another, usually large—and often multinational—company or corporation. ... In law, a patent infringement occurs when the subject-matter claimed in a patent has been utilized by someone other than the rightholder, without the owners approval or in disagreement with the terms of use given by the owner. ... A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which is new, inventive, and...

Controversy

Acacia has been frequently accused of using 'bully' tactics in conducting it's business. After it secures its broad-based patents, it then forces small companies to pay royalties on its licenses by threatening legal action knowing full well these companies cannot afford to defend themselves.

Acacia is named by the EFF as one of the worst offenders for crimes against the public domain including; The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a non-profit advocacy and legal organization with the stated purpose of being dedicated to preserving first amendment rights in the context of todays digital age. ...

• Laughably broad patent would cover everything from online distribution of home movies to scanned documents and MP3s
• Threatening dozens of small companies, including many home-grown adult websites
• Infringement campaign threatens to chill freedom of expression by limiting small companies' and individuals' ability to stream their content online.

They are currently claiming to have a patent for any system that compresses and distributes video and multimedia, especially over the web. This is a very broad claim. They are currently suing the pornography industry, presumably because they would be a soft target. MPEG Audio Layer-3, or more commonly refered to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format invented and standardized in 1991 by a team of engineers working in the framework of the ISO/IEC MPEG audio committee under the chairmanship of Professor Hans Musmann (University... Multimedia is the use of several different media to convey information (text, audio, graphics, animation, video, and interactivity). ... This NeXTcube used by Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server. ... Pavonazzeto marble sculpture, see Erotic art in Pompeii Pornography (from Greek πορνογραφία pornographia — literally writing about or drawings of prostitutes) (also informally referred to as porn, porno) is the representation of the human body or human sexual behaviour with the goal of sexual arousal, similar to, but distinct from, erotica. ...

See also

• Eolas
• Intellectual Ventures
• Patent troll

Eolas is a United States company and patent licensee. ... Intellectual Ventures is a private company founded in 2000 to invest in pure invention. ... Patent troll (also patent pirate) is a derogatory phrase coined by former Intel assistant general counsel, Peter Detkin, in 2001. ...

External links

• Fight the patent Overview of media patent.
• Acacia Technologies
• Article from IEEE on the business model of Acacia.