News on the Milestone VMS Patent Lawsuit

Carlton Purvis

•Published Dec 19, 2013 05:00 AM

Last year, a lawsuit shocked the surveillance industry.

The most well known brand in VMS software, Milestone Systems, was sued by a small, but early, VMS company, JDS Digital Security Systems. The contested element is a basic component of many (or most VMSes), specifically, connecting IP cameras to software, displaying them and identifying them by MAC addresses.

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Comments (3)

Morten Nielsen

•Dec 19, 2013

JDS should be compensated. Clearly Milestone STOLE JDS' idea of storing video from an IP camera on a PC (no way Milestone could have gotten that idea without stealing it from JDS). Identifying the cameras by MAC address must also be something that JDS deserves a patent on. It's not like every router in the world identifies devices by their MAC address, so poor, poor JDS got ripped off by evil Milestone.

- in this case, sarcasm WAS intended

Milestone is going to drag this out to bleed JDS dry, then move for invalidation of the patents, which should be easy.

Undisclosed Manufacturer #1

•Dec 20, 2013

A media access control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to network interfaces for communications on the physical network segment. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

MAC address was designed to identifier network device, including IP camera, there shouldn't be a patent for use MAC address identifying ip camera.

J. A. 'Cal' Calcaterra

•Jan 07, 2014

Re: Patent for MAC use? A Perception?

How about for providing software (a process), unique to a situation, allowing the 'use' of the MAC address?

Zipcodes are 'unique indentifiers'. Does that mean anyone developing software to tie a sellers zipcode to a buyers zipcode (for whatever reason) cannot patent that software?

A stretch but....

Providing a landing strip (uniqely indentified) for an airplane, shouldn't deny patents for different types of airlpanes that 'use' it.