Swarmcast has been granted a patent entitled "Packet transfer mechanism over a peer to peer network," which the company's marketing and PR has mercifully cast as the "File Swarming Patent." The patent protects Swarmcast's techniques for multi-source streaming of HD video over the internet. Patents being what they are, it's not entirely clear how Swarmcast's claims differ from
other peer-to-peer
approaches to efficiently getting lots of bits to end users, but we do know we'd like to see internet distribution of HD content grow. The development of
infrastructure and protocols to get this done suggests some big players have interest in this as well. Yes, it is just a step towards our real bandwidth
desires, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kaiser @ Oct 8th 2007 1:00AM
Obvious?
Kevin Murphy @ Oct 8th 2007 11:51AM
I doubt this is enforceable against Bit Torrent, and may be entirely unenforceable. It looks somewhat like a submarine.
The original patent application was first filed in 2000, but the final version was not filed until December 2001. Bit Torrent was published in April 2001, yet the patent does not mention it as "prior art." Clearly BT existed in the marketplace before the priority date of this patent, so not only does it not affect BT, but it may well be "obvious" or an attempt to patent another's invention. The lack of mention of BT is a red flag to me.
I find it rather annoying that public-domain software folks neglect to patent their inventions, think it will keep everything "free", when in fact it just confuses things.