The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that ten claims from U.S. Patent No. 5,132,992, were invalidated by the U.S.District Court for the Northern District of California.   The EFF highlighted that the ‘992 patent was among the EFF’s Most Wanted Patents for “crimes against the public domain, willful ignorance of prior art and egregious displays of obviousness.”   The Most Wanted Patents were identified as part of EFF’s Patent Busting Project launched In 2004.  The project seeks to identify and “take down” what the EFF referred to as bogus software patents.

The patents of the Most Wanted Patent list and their current status according to EFF include:

5,132,992 – Streaming Media  – Acacia Research (Invalid)
6,614,729 – Live Concert Recording – Clear Channel/Live Nation (Busted)
6,243,373 – VOIP Patent – Acceris
6,264,560 – Online Gaming – Sheldon F. Goldberg (Reexam Granted)
6,687,746 – Personalized Sub-Domain – Ideaflood/Hoshiko (Busted)
6,199,048 – Identifier/Directory Lookup – Neomedia Technologies (Narrowed)
6,513,042 – Online Test-Taking – Test.com (Reexam Granted)
6,672,963 – Handheld Software Emulation – Nintendo
6,411,947 – Natural Language Processing – Firepond/Polaris
5,886,274 – Digital Music Encoding – Seer Systems (Reexam Granted)

The EFF solicits public input to identify prior art that may be used to invalidate a patent on Most Wanted Patent list.  Ordinarily, EFF intends to file reexamination requests to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office against patents on its Most Wanted List once it perceives that a sufficient case exists to invalidate the patent claims.  In the case of the ‘992 patent, EFF was not involved in the case, which was brought by Acacia against Echostar, DirectTV, Time Warner Cable and CSC Holdings, Inc.

The case is In re: Acacia Media Technologies Corp., case no. C05-01114 JW and M 05-01665 JW in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.