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But why Spotify and why now? Couldn't they have hit Apple, Real, Microsoft, (new) Napster, Amazon, Pandora, Last.fm and a zillion other drm-music-to-device streaming services before now? Have they summonsed these services already but we just don't know about it? Who exactly is trying to keep Spotify out?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in 1992 we used to stream music over the network of Sun machines at St. Andrews university[1]. The way we did it was pretty trivial: just piping into rsh from and to /dev/audio. However it was certainly streaming of music by anyone's definition. [1] Making the admins of said network mighty pissed off in the process -- I believe the whole campus was on 10 Mbps at the time.
From what I can tell reading the patent, what you describe would not be prior art. Two things would need to be present -- DRM of some sort. And music metadata. These are two things that I suspect Spotify makes use of. I suspect you probably didn't at St Andrews for your streaming, but let me know if you did.
Once you've got a network, walkmans, a "mic" input, and a speaker, this stuff is obvious and that's the point.
"You could have asked any semi-competent engineer how would you build a digital music streaming service, and you would have received a similar general explanation." The question I had after reading that was "who thought to ask about building a digital music streaming service in 1995?" I was a little disappointed the post didn't cover that. Statements like that remind me of the often cited "I could have done that" whe…
The purpose of a patent is to compensate you not for inventing something but for disclosing exactly how it works. If what you did is straightforward, why should we grant a generation-long monopoly to whoever bothers to do it first?
I guess one way to ask it might be, "how does one find a straightforward path to an unknown destination?"