Wowza Denies Adobe's Allegations of Patent Infringement
当 Adobe filed a lawsuit against Wowza Media Systems earlier this month—claiming patent infringement, 虚假广告, and unfair competition—attendees at 流媒体 East reacted not with surprise at the filing, but surprise at the fact that the suit was filed a full five years after Wowza came to market with its multiprotocol streaming server solution, one that provided a cheaper alternative to Adobe's own Flash Media Server while also offering the ability to serve via other protocols.
Whether it was Wowza's success in the market—the company recently introduced version 3 of the server, 声称有70多个,000 licensees of Wowza Media Server—or some other factor, Adobe在美国提起诉讼.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on May 6, alleging that Wowza is infringing on Adobe's Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) and Encrypted RTMP (RTMPe) patents. While the complaint does not explicitly accuse Wowza founders David Stubenvoll and Charlie Good—both former Adobe employees—of stealing intellectual property, the language of Adobe's complaint implies that accusation, stating that Stubenvoll and Good were "let go by Adobe in 2005 as part of a reduction in force following Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia." Macromedia, of course, originated Flash and its RTMP streaming protocol.
昨天, Wowza对Adobe的投诉做出了回应, calling Adobe's lawsuit "unfounded and spurious," and asserting that Stubenvoll and Good left Adobe voluntarily prior to the completion of the Macromedia acquisition, and that the company developed its version of RTMP and RTMPe "without any access to Macromedia's or Adobe's source code for the RTMP and RTMPe technology." In addition to claiming that Wowza does not infringe on Adobe's U.S. 专利没有. 7,272,658号和. 7,587, 509, Wowza's response claims that those patents do not appear to cover any versions of RTMPe. Wowza also says that RTMPe is "not a strong selling point" for Wowza, and that the open-source "RED 5" Flash server implements its own versions of RTMP and RTMPe.
Wowza also claims that even if it did infringe on either patent, it would be granted a license under the RTMP Specification License openly provided by Adobe in April 2009. "The purpose of Wowza's version of RTMPe is not 'circumvention' as alleged by Adobe,回答是. 正相反, WMS protects content using security schemes and does not 'circumvent' any security schemes including RTMPe."
Wowza also rejects Adobe's claims of 虚假广告 and unfair competition, claiming that "[Wowza] customers know that Wowza's version of RTMPe is not authorized by Adobe and that it is Wowza's independently-created approach to security protection for its licensees and the industry as a whole."
The court document also claims that Wowza first disclosed its version of RTMP to Adobe in an April 2006 meeting, and in October 2007 sought a business relationship with Adobe "so that the streaming industry may obtain the benefit of both companies' approaches to media streaming in a vibrant, 竞争激烈的市场." Wowza claims that it has had "many discussions" with Adobe over the past three-and-a-half years.
在回应中, Wowza is asking the court to dismiss all of Adobe's claims, 并要求对此事进行陪审团审判.
流媒体 has requested further comment from Wowza and Adobe, 如果我们收到这篇文章，我们会更新它.
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