Schools Challenged on Right to Use Video Streaming

Video streaming faces a challenge that could derail its use in American schools and colleges. The Acacia Research Corporation has sent letters to more than 10 universities, including the University of Wyoming and Johns Hopkins University, informing them that if they continue to use video streaming in their distance-education courses, they will be liable to pay licensing fees of about two percent of the income from the courses. Acacia (www.acaciaresearch.com), a small California company, claims it owns five patents on the process that makes video streaming possible.

It looks as if K–12 schools may be next. Robert Berman, Acacia's vice president for business development, says that the way in which many schools use video streaming—downloading brief video segments to broadcast over their networks—means that they are utilizing Acacia's patents. Berman says that his company has contacted several K–12 school districts that use video streaming—he wouldn't specify which ones— "but that hasn't been one of our main focuses to date." He also says, however, that "we cannot allow the use of our technology to go unchallenged," and that Acacia will be contacting more schools in the near future.

Berman estimates that a school district that uses a video streaming service—such as United Learning's UnitedStreaming or AIMS Multimedia's DigitalCurriculum—for classroom instruction would be liable to pay Acacia licensing fees of $2,000 to $5,000 a year, an amount Berman describes as "not onerous."

But Mike McElreath, director of technology for the University of Wyoming's Outreach School, says the fees could harm the school's distance-education programs, which bring college courses to widely scattered rural students. "If their claims are true, it could cancel a lot of what we're doing," he says.