In addition to the cause of some optimism expressed in my earleir post (to which this replies), I found reason for optimism in the following items noted by StormKing in his great reporting:

Leckrone:

15,000 Chips, 10,000 products, comprising 1500
> (!!!) companies.

I hope this means that they have put more than 1,500 companies on legal notice.

Meeting actively with 200 companies

This alone is very promising, and suggests the interpretation above may be correct. This may also explain costs to Alliacense for ongoing business. I don't know exactly what they mean by "meeting actively", but if only a portion of that were face-to-face meetings, the costs would presumeably be quite high.

`336 – 6th request on patent – F & R request via a 3rd party
> (no name provided by Mac). The F & R request was granted. However,Mac
> states recent F&R request: "the claims no longer exist, prior art is
> already considered" – he states it is likely to fail under its
> own weight. (He appeared not worried at all).

This sure sounds like Ease/Opty/Eggbert had it right a couple of months ago. Now if the examiner would just go ahead and act to terminate the '336 examination! This comes across like that's all we're waiting for....good to hear it from them/him. And I would think that if this weren't the case, Henneman would have corrected him.

TPL is viable – will be around.

This is good, but I still don't understand what that $950K was about. I do suspect that it was to enable TPL to contribute their half of MMP-oriented Alliacense expenses (since they're probably burning money to stay afloat and to work the Moore "issues"), though you'd think such expenses could be covered by undistributed licensing revenues, withheld precisely to support ongoing pursuit of licensing.

JMHOs, FWIW....

SGE