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by danieltillett 3517 days ago
John do you know where all the patents on Framefree ended up?
1 comments

Ask Tom Randoph, who was CEO of FrameFree. He's now at Quicksilver Scientific in Denver.
Some venture IP company in Tokyo called "Monolith Co." also had rights in the technology.[1] "As of today (Sept. 5, 2007), the company has achieved a compression rate equivalent to that of H.264 and intends to further improve the compression rate and technology, Monolith said."[2] (This is not Monolith Studios, a game development company in Osaka.) Monolith appears to be defunct.

The parties involved with Framefree were involved in fraud litigation around 2010.[3] The case record shows various business units in the Cayman Islands and the Isle of Jersey, along with Monolith in Japan and Framefree in Delaware. No idea what the issues were. It looks like the aftermath of failed business deals.

The inventors listed on the patents are Nobuo Akiyoshi and Kozo Akiyoshi.[4]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBfss0AaNaU [2] http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20070907/138905... [3] http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/x8gi572m/superior-court-of-... [4] http://patents.justia.com/inventor/nobuo-akiyoshi

Great dectective work. I suspect the IP is now a total mess - with luck nobody has been paying the patent renewal fees and everything is now free.