LARAMIE - Technology commonly used to send prerecorded educational lectures over the Internet is at the center of a dispute between a California firm and an array of universities, including the University of Wyoming.

The Acacia Technologies group of Acacia Research Corp. in Newport Beach, Calif., has written letters to UW officials seeking a licensing fee for patented devices used in creating so-called compressed video.

UW officials contend the Acacia-owned patents are too vague and ambiguous to be enforced. They say the question confronting the university is whether to pay what it considers an unjust fee or face the much greater expense of a court battle.

"There is some risk associated with not paying, because we don't know where it would turn out in court," said Robert Aylward, UW vice president for information technology. "This is one of those things where you can pay a relatively small price and make it go away, but in my mind it's an issue of principle. It's essentially extortion."

Rick Miller, the university's vice president for legal affairs, said Acacia's latest offer is $4,000 per year for about 14 years, which is the duration of the longest-term patent among several involved in the dispute.

The Acacia Research Corp. Web site says the corporation's technology group controls 34 patent portfolios, including more than 130 U.S. patents and some from abroad in a wide range of technologies.

Rob Stewart, investor relations officer for the corporation, said in a telephone interview that the group buys patents filed by individual inventors or small and middle-sized companies that do not have the expertise or capital to handle licensing for the patents.

"We do the same thing the big companies do," Stewart said. "We just do it for the little guy."

Until last month, UW trustees discussed the issue behind closed doors, under an exception to the Wyoming open meetings law that permits closed sessions to discuss litigation. Miller and Aylward brought it up in open session Jan. 20, noting that no lawsuit has been filed and litigation is only one of the possibilities.

Acacia announced in October that it had reached an "accord with attorneys from the university community on licensing terms" based on the school's enrollment. Wesley Blakeslee, associate general counsel of The Johns Hopkins University, was quoted as saying, "The revised license addresses many of the problems that schools had with the terms of the earlier Acacia proposals," but "it is up to each school to determine whether it needs or desires a license."

"Right now I can't tell you what the next step will be" in Wyoming, Miller said.

The dispute is only part of a wide-ranging discussion in the complex world of patent law, made even more complicated by the complexities of the digital age.

In a friend of the court brief filed on Sept. 20, 2004, in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, consumer and public interest groups argued, according to a news release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that standards currently employed by the federal courts "often result in improper patents of uncertain scope and lead to overzealous threat letters and lawsuits."

The foundation said that Acacia Research had "sent more than 4,000 patent demand letters to universities and colleges across the nation, claiming its vaguely worded patents cover all known methods of streaming prerecorded educational lectures over the Internet."

Joining the foundation in the brief, one of many such filed in the case, were Public Knowledge and Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine.

The Court of Appeals went part way toward meeting their demands, abandoning its previous position that the broadest dictionary definition of terms be used in resolving patent cases. The groups said they were still not satisfied, however, that the court had provided adequate guidelines for resolving ambiguities.

The Supreme Court has been asked to review the court's decision, but has not decided whether to do so. Joshua D. Sarnoff, assistant director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic at American University's Washington College of Law, said, "The case is highly significant because unless the Supreme Court weighs in on how to interpret claims, all claims of all patents are now subject to the rules of claim interpretation articulated" by the Court of Appeals.

In the case of the University of Wyoming, Aylward said the vagueness of the patent lay mainly in the fact that, he said, "It doesn't tell you how it does the compression. It's what I call a Black Box patent. A Black Box is something that has an input and an output, and in between you don't know what happens."

Miller told the trustees, "This is bigger than Wyoming and bigger than higher education. According to their theory, almost everybody in America is in violation."

Star-Tribune correspondent W. Dale Nelson can be reached at {M3wdnelson@bresnan.net.