Many thanks to orang_ganjil for taking the time to come to the hearing Thursday. orang_ganjil is a technical person that works in the computer industry and it is very helpful to have some with a technical background reporting on what happened at the hearing. I look forward to reading vasco_bill's report on the hearing because with his legal training will offer another insight into what happened in SF. vasco_bill is having computer problems and it may take a few days to see his ports.

Here are my thoughts on orang_ganjil comments on Time Compression. orang_ganjil posted:

<<1. I disagree with squidoo on the time compression argument being Apple's weakest. It certainly is if you read the patents and documents, but I think it was the most persuasive argument made today.>>

For me the message and the messenger are two separate issues. Powers is by far the best Apple presenter. The meltdown of "Nick" Brown will be the topic for a different post, but Powers would be an excellent used car salesman. He would try to convince you that the "flat tire" is actually a safety feature of the car designed to keep you from driving too fast. He is very good at going down a rabbit hole and in telling a story.

His message on time compression was shot full of holes in the Markman hearing and here are just a few I remember:

1. Powers again used a slide to show how time compression according to Apple means playing a 33 rpm at 45 rpm. Earlier in the hearing Judge Patel described how she was able to download an audio file that was some sort of "History of Something - Part 1" in 2.5 minutes but it played for a much longer time than 2.5 minutes. She made no comments about the audio sounding like the chipmunks. She seemed to me to be indicating that she understood how the Burst "Faster-Than-Real-Time" paradigm works and that this is something she does all the time.

2. It was pointed out several times that the Random Access Storage (one of the disputed structures in the patent) has no application in the "time compression" world of Apple's construction. If you search the Haskell patent for the words "digital", "conversion" or "data compression" you find there are no occurrences of these words in the patent. Clearly, Apple's "time compression" construction has no application to the Burst patents.

3. At one point in the hearing the AMD 7971 compression chip came up for discussion. Since the AMD 7971 is a DATA COMPRESSION chip it has no application in Apple's "Time Compression" world. Yet, the chip is mentioned several times in the '995' patent. I think that this point was made by one of the Burst attorneys during the hearing. An entire paragraph in the patent is used to show how something like this chip could be used to do data compression. If you are doing time compression as described in the Haskell patent there is no need for data compression so why would the Burst patent include information on the AMD 7971 chip?

My reading of Judge Patel is that she understands the way Apple views "time compression" and the way Burst views "time compressed representation". She experiences the Burst view of "time compressed representation" every time she downloads an audio or audio/video file from the Internet, so I think she is clearly going to reject the Apple view of "time compression" and support Burst's "time compressed representation".

In retrospect, I think that Apple's overemphasis on trying to sell their view of "time compression" has backfired on them because each time they try to sell this idea it brings more focus to this issue and more focus ends up making this look like a silly argument, which it is.