A pair of software companies linked with the Kazaa peer-to-peer network are claiming that they hold patent rights to technology behind much of the world's Internet song-swapping and are demanding that several smaller file-sharing networks obtain licenses in order to continue operating.
Attorneys for Altnet Inc. and its parent company, Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based Brilliant Digital Entertainment Inc., sent letters to U.S.-based file-swapping firms -- including LimeWire, BearShare and Mashboxx -- claiming that the companies were using patented technology in their products. The letter doesn't explicitly threaten a lawsuit, but does invite the firms to "discuss licensing opportunities."
If a court upholds the patent claims, it could provide a new revenue stream for Altnet and give the firm a stranglehold over a popular means of identifying and trading digital copes of music, movies and software just as a fledgling industry has sprung up to try making money off the concept of legitimate file sharing.
"They're using our technology. We just want them to pay us a reasonable fee for it," said Lawrence Hadley, counsel for Altnet and Brilliant. Hadley wouldn't name the networks targeted by the letters, but said copies had gone out to most of the major peer-to-peer developers in the United States.
Even if the letters don't lead to legal action, they are likely to heighten tensions in the already strained relationship between Kazaa and the rest of the players in the P2P arena. "It couldn't really be any worse," said Jon Newton, editor of P2Pnet, an online publication covering the file-sharing industry.
Internet song swapping rose to popularity with the emergence of Napster in the late 1990s. After a judge ordered Napster to shut down in 2001, a host of second-generation song-swapping networks, including Morpheus, Grokster and Kazaa emerged to fill the void. Kazaa is one of the most popular applications and remains one of the most heavily downloaded pieces of software on the Internet. Altnet's software allows users to purchase liscensed copies of music over the Kazaa network.
Altnet has already inked a licensing deal for the technology with one of the largest peer-to-peer companies, Vanuatu-based Sharman Networks, the firm that distributes Kazaa. The connections between Altnet and Kazaa -- which share a "joint enterprise agreement," according to Sharman -- are among the issues currently being addressed in a copyright infringement case filed by the Australian music industry against Sharman.
Patent for 'Hashing'
The letters' recipients and a number of intellectual-property experts say Altnet will have little chance of winning a court claim, since the patents cover a broad scientific premise that predates Altnet, file-swapping and even the Internet.
The technology at issue is "hashing" -- a method for assigning a unique tag or "hash" to a digital file. By comparing the hashes, rather than entire files, file-swapping software can quickly process users' requests for specific songs, movies or other files.
Sam Darwin, the chief information officer of Miami-based BearShare, acknowledged that the company uses hashing to identify files, saying the practice has been routine in the peer-to-peer community. "It's really common sense, which makes it hard for me to imagine that [the patent] would be defensible in court," Darwin said.
