[deadsy]

Where in the claims did you see adaptive encoding? It seems to be describing any sort of load balancing of media servers based on network throughput to the client. Do bit-torrent clients do that? Or do they just throttle their own response to a peer based on the p2p throughput? In any case claim 1 is overly broad and is obvious. I hope someone digs up prior art and gets it invalidated.

[sukuriant]

IANAL, and (especially) IANA[Patent]Lawyer, but, BitTorrent is such a precise design, I imagine all they would have to do is file a patent for the more specific nature of their work, much like how the mp3 format is patented.

That said, .... wow @ that patent.