Viewpoint Corporation

Dg Fastchannel, Inc

Enliven Marketing Technologies Corporation

Sreekant Kotay

Michael Bryan Herf

David Feldman

James A Klingshirn

Robert Eric Rice

Dmitry Paperny

A system and method for licensing the use of 'plug-in' type software that plays audio, video, and three dimensional content which logs the network address from which content is downloaded and played by the plug-in client software, then sends this information to a billing system maintained by the plug-in software developer. This billing system can then bill the content provider that is associated with the network address based on the number of times the content is played by users of the plug-in software. The system and method can also employ a public key encryption scheme to ensure that the network address information received by the plug-in software is valid and to block the playing of content from content providers that are delinquent in their license payments.

Systems and methods for serverless software licensing

A method and system for overlaying an object in a window of a software application where an overlay plane is composed of at least one object and the overlay plane is overlaid with the window using either a layering feature of the software application or by directly compositing the overlay plane with the window using enhanced functionality not included in the software application. The overlaying of the overlay plane in relation to the window does not depend on a cursor or pointing device designated position but may rather, for example, be arbitrarily placed or may be positioned in proximity to the text or graphic link used to initiate the overlaying process. The method and system may be implemented using a plugin-control for the software application.

Method and system for using a hyperlink, banner, or graphical icon to initiate the overlaying of an object on a window

An efficient method and system for displaying integrated transparent objects and animation with a window, such as an Internet Web page is described. The present invention implements a plugin-control, such as a Netscape plugin or ActiveX control, in the host program, such as a Web browser, wherein the plugin-control provides at least one graphics buffer in addition to the buffers used by the host program. The plugin-control can function according to the host program Application Programming Interface (API) for the plugin-control under which the at least one additional buffer is used to composite a &ldquo;compositing plane&rdquo; containing the transparent objects and animation with the host program window and where the resulting composited scene is returned to the host program buffers as part of the regular host program draw pipe. Additionally, the host program API may be circumvented and the resulting composited scene may be written directly to the front buffer for display on the display device. In particular, in one embodiment, the plugin-control implements the at least one additional buffer it provides in the system memory in order to improve the performance of compositing images with many transparent pixels with a Web browser window. This improvement results from both the faster reading of data from the system memory than from video and the higher number of read-modify-write operations where a large number of transparent pixels exist and from current Web browser implementation of buffers solely in video memory.

Method and system for displaying a composited image

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Richboro, PA, United States of America

Sreekant Kotay