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This patent was filed in 1995 [edit: and it actually claims priority back to 1994]. Was there really much relevant prior art in this space back then? One other

This patent was filed in 1995 [edit: and it actually claims priority back to 1994]. Was there really much relevant prior art in this space back then? One other comment: I really appreciate that techdirt actually included a claim from the patent. Most articles posted here just quote the title or the abstract, which is useless as far as determining what's covered and what's not.

rwmj 15y ago
Back in 1992 we used to stream music over the network of Sun machines at St. Andrews university[1]. The way we did it was pretty trivial: just piping into rsh from and to /dev/audio. However it was certainly streaming of music by anyone's definition. [1] Making the admins of said network mighty pissed off in the process -- I believe the whole campus was on 10 Mbps at the time.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  From what I can tell reading the patent, what you describe would not be prior art. Two things would need to be present -- DRM of some sort. And music metadata. These are two things that I suspect Spotify makes use of. I suspect you probably didn't at St Andrews for your streaming, but let me know if you did.
  - monochromatic 15y ago
    Just a semantic thing, but it is still prior art... it's just probably not prior art that, on its own, is enough to invalidate these claims. It could still be relevant for obviousness purposes.
  - lukeschlather 15y ago
    That still doesn't make something clever enough to merit a patent.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - zach 15y ago
    I know I happily streamed .au music from the sounds.sdsu.edu FTP server into /dev/audio (late at night, of course) in that era. Since it was an FTP server, I suppose there was a rough sort of DRM (maximum connections allowed) and metadata (directories and filenames describing the artist and song name). Even though I had seen a good deal of MBONE broadcasts, it was quite a novelty to hear a song streamed on demand.
  - rwmj 15y ago
    Fair enough, but given almost any thought at that time, we'd have thought of metadata (probably not DRM because we wouldn't have believed something so stupid was needed). Once you've got a network, walkmans, a "mic" input, and a speaker, this stuff is obvious and that's the point.

rwmj 15y ago

Back in 1992 we used to stream music over the network of Sun machines at St. Andrews university[1]. The way we did it was pretty trivial: just piping into rsh from and to /dev/audio. However it was certainly streaming of music by anyone's definition. [1] Making the admins of said network mighty pissed off in the process -- I believe the whole campus was on 10 Mbps at the time.

kenjackson 15y ago
From what I can tell reading the patent, what you describe would not be prior art. Two things would need to be present -- DRM of some sort. And music metadata. These are two things that I suspect Spotify makes use of. I suspect you probably didn't at St Andrews for your streaming, but let me know if you did.
- monochromatic 15y ago
  Just a semantic thing, but it is still prior art... it's just probably not prior art that, on its own, is enough to invalidate these claims. It could still be relevant for obviousness purposes.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  That still doesn't make something clever enough to merit a patent.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- zach 15y ago
  I know I happily streamed .au music from the sounds.sdsu.edu FTP server into /dev/audio (late at night, of course) in that era. Since it was an FTP server, I suppose there was a rough sort of DRM (maximum connections allowed) and metadata (directories and filenames describing the artist and song name). Even though I had seen a good deal of MBONE broadcasts, it was quite a novelty to hear a song streamed on demand.
- rwmj 15y ago
  Fair enough, but given almost any thought at that time, we'd have thought of metadata (probably not DRM because we wouldn't have believed something so stupid was needed). Once you've got a network, walkmans, a "mic" input, and a speaker, this stuff is obvious and that's the point.