Microsoft Pays $440M to License InterTrust Patents

theodp writes "Microsoft is paying $440 million to InterTrust to settle a three-year-old patent infringement lawsuit over DRM technology for protecting music, movies and other digital content against piracy. Under the settlement agreement, customers can use Microsoft products and services without a license from InterTrust. Developers, however, may need a license from InterTrust for other uses, including the combination of Microsoft technology with third-party technology." C.J. adds a link to the New York Times' coverage of the settlement.

Comments

It's pretty troublesome

[eclectro]

Here is an earlier article discussing the Intertrust patents, and their apparent broadness. There are links to the actual patents themselves.

As other posters have noted, this settlement gives Intertrust a leg up on the competition (which they probably will sue now).

It would be an interesting exercise to see if there are any publications that discuss "trusted computing" prior to the Intertrust patents.

Also, Intel announced a mobile cpu that has a DRM coprocessor in the same package. Intel could head this direction with all their chips.

Given all the evils of DRM, I would rather see a chip from Intel with DRM succeed, rather than using Microsoft palladium, Phoenix DRM bios, or other software component. Having it in hardware makes it a level playing field for every developer, commercial or open source. I am not saying any of it is good, only what the lesser of evils would be.

Preferably their would be an open source competitive solution.