12/18--Acacia Research Corp. wants it's pound of flesh. The Newport Beach, California, firm is suing dozens of companies in the online porn industry claiming patent infringement in a case that could have far reaching implications for any company that offers video, music or other digital content over internet, satellite and cable lines, including Telemarktips.com and our much beloved TeleVision. The 22-employee Acacia, which buys patents and enforces them, filed complaints in federal court against 27 adult Web sites, giving them until Dec. 15 to respond to claims they are violating a 10-year-old patent Acacia owns. While some have responded, the rest could face a costly court battle, which Acacia plans to expand to include other digital media and video streaming industries. "It's not like we singled out the adult entertainment industry. They just happen to be the biggest users of video streaming technology on the Internet and have been doing it for several years and making money," said Rob Berman, Acacia's senior vice president of business development and its general counsel. Some sites are now in talks to hand Acacia 2 percent of revenue generated from a technology Acacia calls Digital Media Technology (DMT). DMT encompasses five patents issued from 1992 to 2000 by the U.S. Patent Office that cover digitally "compressed and encoded audio and/or video information (that) is sent over standard telephone, cable or satellite broadcast channels ... preferably in less than real time," says U.S. Patent No. 5,132,992. "If you have a Web site, and you have video on your Web site, and it's digitized and stored on your server," Berman said, "in most cases, yes, we feel that process is covered by our patents." Of course not everyone agrees with that assessment. "It seems to me that the claims that they're making are huge," said Tom Hymes, editor-in-chief of Adult Video News, a trade journal for the adult Internet industry. "It seems to me that they're saying to anyone, if you stream video over the Internet, you're violating their patents. In the future, everything you do will use streaming video." Hymes told the OC Register that he knows at least 30 companies that have been served with notices that they are violating Acacia's patents. Acacia, was founded in the 1980s as an intellectual property firm that acquires companies to make money off of licensing fees. To date the firm's biggest success has come with the V-Chip technology it acquired after buying a small company called SoundView Technologies. The V-Chip allows parents to block selected shows on their televisions. Two years ago, TV manufacturers mobilized to fight Acacia's patent-infringement claims over the V-Chip. More than a dozen manufacturers decided to pay a one-time licensing fee, which netted Acacia $24.1 million in revenue in 2001. The year before Acacia reported just $100,000 in total revenue. The others went to court, and, four months ago, Acacia lost its case. It's now pursuing antitrust charges alleging the TV manufacturers conspired together to avoid paying the licensing fees.