DRM company acquires technology from music search engine killed by copyright suits

Monday, Intertrust Technologies Corporation, a company with more than a hundred patents for various Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies, announced it has acquired all of SeeqPod's software and patents. The company went bankrupt after being sued by Warner Music Group in 2008.

SeeqPod was a music search engine that found, and let users listen to, songs in their entirety. The engine's algorithm set and technology reportedly were developed by biologists working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to discover hidden relationships in genomic data. The technology identifies patterns in data that are distributed across the Internet. This included indexing and finding playable search results for audio, video, podcasts and text.

The search engine was sued in 2008 by Warner Music Group for copyright infringement, and subsequently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009. The assets come to Intertrust via a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy proceeding.

"Intertrust plans to use SeeqPod's breakthrough technology in distributed search systems in a variety of applications and services for Internet television, targeted advertising, recommendation systems, electronic music distribution and healthcare information services," Dave Maher, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Intertrust said on Monday.