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Well it's almost the night before Christmas and who do we find creeping through the house? Sadly, it's not Santa but someone who seems to have taken a leaf out of the Acacia playbook.

Remember Acacia? You know, that company that bought the company that owned the patent for sending video over the Web. If you remember they sat on that patent for a while and then started sending out letters to anyone who had a website that was offering video.

Lot's of site owners here in adult got letters from Acacia demanding that they pay royalties on an annual basis and if they didn't they were going to get the pants sued off them. Even small-time amateur sites like mine were important enough to get a letter and lots of people either ditched video or caved in to Acacia's demands.

Fortunately a few stood up to the company and they backed off but not before there was a lot of unhappiness and harsh words said within this industry. Those who caved in to Acacia's demands came in for a lot of criticism because it was obvious that if we stood united we were going to beat them.

Well now we have a company called Vuestar Technologies Pty Ltd to contend with and it's just not here in adult that's going to have to deal with Vuestar. According to Wikipedia Vuestar Technologies is based in Singapore and is a subsidiary of an Australian company ... Goldspirit Investments.

Vuestar claims to own a world-wide patent 'relating to search techniques using hyperlinked images to other websites or web pages'. What that means in plain language is that if you have a thumbnail or a large image that is clickable and, once clicked, will take a surfer to another web page or another web site then you have used technology that is covered by the patent that is held by Vuestar.

Now stop and think for a moment ... how many times in this industry do we use images to link to other web pages? Just about every time we use a thumbnail we're using the technology that this company has a patent for.

How many times in both mainstream and adult do webmasters use an image to link to another web page or another website? Oh and let's not forget the banners that we all use either ... they're images that we turn into clickable links to link out to other places too. And they're covered by this patent.

So this is a serious issue for us and it really could be something that could start to bite us in the months ahead. The patent holder has already made a few tentative attempts to obtain money from websites who do use images to link out to others. One online community received an account for around $3600 and undoubtedly more are to come.

In fact you can just about guarantee that more website owners will receive accounts under this patent because the patent holder has announced that it intends to enforce its rights under the patent in Australia and the United States.

The patent holder will charge an annual license fee and the amount will depend on the amount of traffic a website receives as well as the number of out-links that use an image. Evidently governments, charities and non-commercial sites will not be charged but the patent holder intends to recover plenty from everyone else.

As we all know, the adult industry is always seen as a cash-cow by everyone who doesn't actually work in the industry so you can bet that the patent holder will be looking over here and licking his lips. The fight might be on once again but hopefully this time we won't see a whole bunch of paysite owners cave in rather than stand up and fight.

And there is some value in fighting rather than giving in because some people are already suggesting that the approval system for the patent was flawed and common sense would have to make you wonder what the technical difference is between a link that uses text and one that uses an image.

Unfortunately fighting a patent like this takes time and some money and all too often it's cheaper and easier just to pay the license fee so I'm sure that some will do that. Of course that just encourages more bogus claims to be made for patents that aren't sustainable and so even though someone may be able to stop Vuestar others will come along and this is a problem that will probably never go away.