Legal Issues
It was reported in 2000 that "AlphaCom Communications holds patent rights to the non-Nyquist filters and other aspects of VMSK and VMSK/2 technology. The company claimed to have secured these rights as a result of a contract with H.R. Walker, doing business as Pegasus Data Systems, to purchase the patents and fund further R&D. AlphaCom defaulted on the contract and a legal dispute over ownership arose. A 2003 SEC charge against AlphaCom and its principals alleges that "defendants raised these funds by falsely representing that AlphaCom owned exclusive rights to novel Internet technologies, Network Utilities (NU) and Very Minimal Shift Keying (VMSK), that were supposed to increase Internet downloading speeds and the speed of access to the Internet. Many of these claims could not be supported. "
In order to avoid further legal costs, Walker agreed to surrender the ownership of the VMSK patents US 5,930,303 and US 6,748,022 to AlphaCom in return for AlphaCom making no further claims against Walker or Pegasus regarding any newer methods. The special near zero group delay filters required are claimed by Walker to be non patentable due to prior publication.
In 2002, "Walker said the company ( Pegasus Data Systems ) was delayed when one of its financial backers ( AlphaCom ) went out of business in late 2000. Now armed with new backers, the company is again moving forward with a new method, he said."
In 2007, Compress Technologies, Inc., announced on their web site that they had "acquired VMSK Technology." Their domain name has since been acquired by someone else.
Read more about this topic: Very Minimum-shift Keying
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