Acacia: Not a Plant, But Some Think It Is a Parasite

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Acacia: Not a Plant, But Some Think It Is a Parasite

8/18/2004

By Terry Calhoun

In some respects this is even more reminiscent of that old scam, predating the public Internet, where companies would simply send out invoices for photocopier toner and other products that were never in fact ordered, hoping that some administrator at a large company or organization would just go ahead and pay the invoice. Please don't do that without careful investigation first. There are three very good places to turn, either for more information or more help. They are the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Council on Education (ACE), EDUCAUSE, and StreamingMedia.com.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Patent Busting Project - www.eff.com

The EFF believes that the U.S. Patent Office frequently d'es an inadequate job of documentation in patents in the software and Internet area, partly due to the fact that what is called "prior art" - that is, evidence and documentation of prior inventions - is poorly documented and widely distributed. After all, IT folks tend to invent it and use it, not invent it and write academic papers about it. The EFF has actually named Acacia as the number one "most wanted" company for "crimes against the public domain; willful ignorance of prior art; egregious display of obviousness. The EFF is quite eager to hear from colleges and universities willing to assist in their initiative. Here is their info page on patent issues - www.eff.org/patent/ - and here is their list of "most wanted" patent abusers - http://www.eff.org/patent/wanted/.

The American Council on Education (ACE) - www.acenet.org

Sheldon Steinbach, vice president and general counsel at ACE says of Acacia's methods that they amount to "an extortion trap." Wes Blakeslee, associate general counsel at Johns Hopkins, has created a group of institutions willing to join together and fight legally against Acacia's claims with regard to higher education. We spoke with him on the phone while preparing this article and he was grateful that ACE has agreed to assist in coordinating that effort. If you want to join the other colleges and universities in their fight, contact ACE. That contact is best made by your institution's legal counsel if at all possible. A guide to contacting pertinent people at ACE is here: http://www.acenet.edu/contact.cfm and here is an ACE article on the issue: http://www.acenet.edu/hena/readArticle.cfm?articleID=1017.

StreamingMedia.com - http://www.streamingmedia.com/patent/

This organization is perhaps the leading online location for resources and links to resources documenting the effect of Acacia's claims in a variety of industries.

Now, it is possible that Acacia sent its demand letter to legal counsel for your institution, perhaps to IT staff, even to faculty, as has happened at some colleges. In many places, the letter was probably filed or tossed. In other places, there may be people stressing out or, worse, perhaps getting ready to sign on the dotted line and write a check. It is my opinion (Note that this is not legal advice.) that anyone concerned about the impact on their institution should visit the StreamingMedia.com site and the EFF for information. If your institution has received a demand for a licensing agreement, I hope that you have your legal counsel contact ACE. The fight needs to be fought, but it is not a fight that any one institution needs to fight on its own!

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "Acacia: Not a Plant, But Some Think It Is a Parasite," Campus Technology, 8/18/2004, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=39914

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