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Acacia Patent Info
Acacia's licensing efforts are based on five patents, all of which cover basically the same thing: patents #5,253,275, #5,550,863 and #6,002,720 are "open continuations" of patent #5,132,992, an "Audio and Video Receiving and Transmission System," which was issued in July 1992. The fifth patent, #6,144, 702, is described as a "division" of the '992 patent and was approved in November of 2000.

The '992 patent abstract reads as follows: "A system of distributing video and/or audio information employs digital signal processing to achieve high rates of data compression. The compressed and encoded audio and/or video information is sent over standard telephone, cable or satellite broadcast channels to a receiver specified by a subscriber of the service, preferably in less than real time, for later playback and optional recording on standard audio and/or video tape."

The Internet as a transmission medium is not mentioned in the patents. All five patents were assigned to H. Lee Browne and Paul Yurt; Browne later did business as Greenwich Information Technologies LLC, which Acacia first invested in and then bought outright in 2001.

Acacia reportedly began laying out its intellectual-property strategy in May 2002, which appears remarkably similar to the path taken by memory technology company Rambus Inc., which convinced smaller memory firms to license its technology. Rambus' progress was essentially stopped short by larger firms, who exposed some of the company's legally questionable business practices and prompted an FTC investigation.

Acacia also owns several patents related to the V-chip, a content-monitoring device once considered to be an integral part of the future of television. Acacia Research received $25.6 million in payments from television manufacturers that licensed its V-chip technology in 2001.

In August of 2002, Acacia sued 17 television manufacturers over the V-chip technology, which its Soundview subsidiary owns. Major television manufacturers such as Philips Electronics, Hitachi, Samsung Electronics, Funai Electric, Sanyo Manufacturing, LG Electronics, Daewoo, Thomson Multimedia, and Matsushita have already agreed to license Acacia's V-chip patent, the company claims.