Spotify smacked with patent suits in US and Netherlands US company PacketVideo has filed patent infringement lawsuits against Spotify with courts in the Netherlands and the US. In the Dutch courts, PacketVideo will claim the Swedish music streaming service violated European patents belonging to PacketVideo dating back to the mid-1990s. It will argue the same in respect of a US …
Your hard drive is connected to your PC by an internal cable so you're not streaming.
Were to say that you were streaming from your NAS to your PC or wi-fi connected lap top? Maybe.
But you're not a commercial organization.
At the same time, I would have to argue that its a trivial and obvious patent.
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Apart from the music being digitised, that patent sounds a lot like the Post Office's Dial A Disc service. Anyone here old enough to remember dialling 160 to hear abysmal quality music (it always seemed to Free singing Alright Now whenever I tried it).
http://www.lightstraw.co.uk/ate/main/ris/16.html
Streaming music to consumers wasn't big business in the 90s, but there should still be plenty of prior art. "Push technology" and "publish-subscribe" content delivery were big buzzwords by mid-decade, and there was no shortage of research and experimental systems.
Plenty of websites had (typically god-awful) musical accompaniment; that was often in the form of MIDI files as MP3 (MPEG-2 Level III audio) was only standardized in 1994, and PCM formats (WAV, AIFF, etc) took too much bandwidth. But whatever the format, delivering music data over HTTP and having it play in the browser was close enough to "streaming" to serve as prior art for this patent, IMHO.
The original Timidity MIDI-player browser plugin was created in '95, for example. That's the same year this patent was filed. And I don't believe Timidity was the first music plugin.
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