Why would Microsoft have brazenly stolen Burst's technologies instead of licensing them? "It's our suspicion that they thought they could get it without having to pay," says Burst attorney Wecker, referring to the Real deal. In other words, Microsoft had no incentive to license Burst when it knew that Burst would have nowhere else to turn.

But Burst had a portfolio of public patents protecting the technology -- wouldn't Microsoft have seen that as an obstacle?

"Patents are useful," says Wecker, "but they can be challenged." In other words, Microsoft may have violated the patents only because it thought it could get away with doing so.

According to Mike Madison, a patent expert at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, patent cases are extremely difficult to prove. A defendant usually argues that a patent is not valid, and then if the firm loses on that claim, it argues that its process doesn't violate the patent. Proving that a patent has been violated is expensive and time-consuming, which plays to the advantage of big firms with lots of money.

None of this means that Microsoft is guilty of any wrongdoing. Doherty, of Envisioneering, says that regardless of who holds the patent, what may count is the "implementation of those patents." If you look up the engineering notes at all the firms, he says, "you'll likely see a lot of parallel discoveries. If you deposed everyone you might find that someone in Burst came up with the idea on March 13, and someone in Microsoft came up with it on March 15. Now, Burst is entitled to feel proud, but what usually happens is that even though someone patents something early, the people who make money are the ones who come out with products closer to market."

Did Microsoft have an incentive to violate Burst's patents, though? As a matter of pure speculation, it's clear the company would have had some cause to not care too much about Burst's intellectual property. Not only might the company have felt relatively certain that it would win a patent case, but the stakes are in any case huge.

"Microsoft's strategy is to popularize the Windows Media format," says Directions on Microsoft analyst Rosoff. By most accounts, Microsoft's video formats are already better than open standards already in use. They yield smaller files of higher fidelity than MPEG-2, which is what DVDs and MP3s are coded in, and MPEG-4, which many competitors of Microsoft hope will become the "next generation" format for digital video.

Already, many digital music players and DVD players can play Windows Media audio files, and Aldridge, at Microsoft, says that some DVD players might soon play Windows Media video discs in addition to standards-based DVDs. "I can't imagine people going out en masse tomorrow or even next year to throw out their DVD players to buy new Windows Media DVD players," says Rosoff, "but Microsoft looks at the long run. And in the long run it may be possible."

And the first step in making the format popular for devices is making it popular on the Internet. And the key to making it popular on the Internet is make it stream faster than every other player. But Microsoft's route to that last step, according to Lang and his lawyers, was blocked by Burst's patents.

In the beginning, says Lang, he trusted Microsoft. "This was during the antitrust trial, but despite what everybody said, I had always given them the benefit of the doubt. And you've got to remember they always acted friendly."

But as things started to fall apart for his company, it became clear to him that Microsoft wasn't going to let Burst succeed. "And this company -- we played by all the rules. We'd had the vision early, way early. We did it all by the rules, and even when we encountered all these roadblocks we still went ahead. And in the end we were right -- it was our technology that was the best."

That should have been enough, he says -- but it was not. Which is why he's now here, at his lawyer's office. "If there's such a thing as justice in the business world, we'll end up recouping the value of our technology," Lang says as he looks out at the bay. "Litigation was never our business plan."

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