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Lucent Sues Microsoft, Wants All 360s Recalled
robyannetta writes "Lucent has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, demanding that they pull all Xbox 360s from the market. Lucent claims that Microsoft has violated their MPEG2 patents which they claim they patented in 1993." While it's unlikely console will be pulled from shelves, it's one way to generate some publicity.
Wow. Suppose this were to happen with other electronics ..
I mean, how exactly are they supposed to really enforce such a thing? Would owning an XBOX 360 then be illegal? If that becomes precedent, that frankly scares the shit out of me. Ten years down the line, having some of my electronics retroactively made illegal to possess?
I'm no MS fanboy by the stretch of anyone's imagination - frankly I loathe them.
But given the wider implications here, I hope they get a partial victory out of this - such that people who allready have this equipment can keep it.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
See above. So which is it? Nvidia makes thier graphics chip right? So wouldn't the blame chain trickle down to them?
PS, typin live at my karaoke show right now. Follow the link in my sig, say hi, if you like streamin video of drunk girls singin.
So that's like, what, ten or twelve tops? It's still on preorder everywhere I've visited.
In all seriousness...how can this even be possible as a lawsuit. I think someone didn't refresh their browser and saw a joke news story from April 1st.
MPEG2 and all MPEG related standards are "owned" by MPEG LA, who licenses the technology. It would be one thing if Microsoft deployed a product with MPEG2 playback capabilities without paying the license, but then where is Lucent in all this? Is this some crappy dredge up of a vague compression scheme like Unisys pulled?
If so, why Microsoft? There's about a billion DVD players out in the market right now that would be infringing on this patent. Maybe the patent is only related to MPEG2 and networks? Whoops...a billion PCs out there that would be targets. Isn't Lucent in the middle of being bought by some French company? Does it make any sense to begin some protracted NTP vs Blackberry type war in the middle of that?
ite
The whole article amounts to two lines on some website I've never heard of so...I'm calling it a belated April Fool's...the April Fool being CowboyNeal.
-JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Not because I want them to stick it to Microsoft, but because Microsoft has the dollars behind it to be able to make a difference in the future, and would be motivated to do so when they personally feel the impact that software patents are having on software development.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I personally like how John Carmack relates software patents to getting mugged... to state loosely what he said, you think of the patent system as being in place to help the poor inventor guy who spends his whole life working on his one little invention, and then some large billion dollar company comes along and steals the idea and gets rich, leaving no credit to him. In that case, patents are great.
But if five companies hire five programmers to set out and do the exact same thing, the first one to make it to the patent office takes the cake and everyone else gets sucked into the legal blackhole (or just goes home with their tail between their legs).
It's definitely time to revisit our patent laws regarding technology; the industry moves too fast - patents like this literally stop innovation and cause consumers to pay out the ass for everything.
I agree that copyrights are a little more reasonable; it should be illegal to clone the next guy's solution; but it should not be illegal to solve the same problem.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
I understand how little extortion, er, "Property Management" firms can sue the likes of RIM, because they don't make or do anything but leech off anyone successful, so you can't threaten them with anything. Or a company on its last legs can make a crazy last-ditch effort to sue themselves into profitability, like SCO. But what's Lucent really doing here? Isn't Microsoft going to turn around and use it's double-click patent to try to make Lucent stop selling everything they make that involves a GUI at any point? Among thousands of other similar suits they could doubtlessly file covering every aspect of everything Lucent does.
Basically, what's Lucent thinking, and why doesn't MAD work here?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Not to plug my blog, but I recently wrote about patent abuse. The problem isn't so much unethical companies, the problem is that the incentives to patent are all wrong.
/.) but the patent system does need some reforming.
Microsoft is remarkably clean of patent/copyright abuse. Most other companies have less than perfect records. Even companies we see as victimized (ex - Apple sued by creative over 'heirarchal displays' and the Apple record label) have sued others (ex - apple again suing over trade secrets and tried to get gag orders for blogs).
Yeah the Mac fans will bury this comment (just like criticizing Linux is dangerous on
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't
Wasn't Microsoft claiming that it would protect all users of its software from intellectual property threats? Wasn't Microsoft suggesting that Linux/Open Source software was unable to provide indemnification in this way, and using this in its fight to bring down Linux/Open Soruce?
s /topics/policy.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/fact
So why isn't Microsoft offering the same protection for Xbox users? Is it because it doesn't have enough power behind it to fight back against these issues in the console market?
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Neither MS nor Lucent invented MPEG, and neither of them invented microchips. MPEG and microchips are both patent-deserving revolutionary inventions; but putting a software algorithm into a chip is basic stuff. If MS used Lucent's exact specification for doing so, perhaps there's a copyright infringement somewhere... that's about it.
The more I think about it, the more I think we should do away with patent law altogether, or mainly apply it to credit's sake i.e. if I come up with a new kind of telephone, I would have to give credit to A.G. Bell for his invention; not pay him a bunch of royalties. He didn't build my phone, he built his own and has every right to market and sell his phone. He also has every right to claim that he's the inventor. But I built my phone, and thus should be making the money for it, while stating something like "Based on technology from Alexander Bell, etc."
There's six billion people on the planet. Two of them are likely to have the same idea; it's absolutely not fair that one of them gets all the money just because he made it to the patent office first, or that he thought of it first, or whatever. People work for money. If I think up a brilliant idea and patent it, I did a little work... but all of the other people who perfect my idea, produce it, market it, support it, etc. are the real workers, and should be compensated as such. Essentially, the lone inventor is at fault for trying to do everything himself and not trying to work with all of the other talented people in an organization that could really make his idea work for society in a beneficial way. It's a radical idea I suppose, but very applicable to software. After all, we as programmers are constantly taught not to reinvent the wheel, when in fact patent law forces us to.
Am I in another universe here, or does that seem reasonable?
. . . Microsoft couldn't just buy all of Lucent, fire everyone and part the company out to the highest bidder.
Don't mess with people who have enough money to buy you and all of your competition . . . There is no job security in that.
> Unless things have changed MASSIVELY at Lucent within the past 3-4 years
Does this count ? :
On April 2, 2006, Alcatel and Lucent announced that they entered into a definitive merger agreement to create the first truly global communications solutions provider with the broadest wireless, wireline and services portfolio in the industry.
http://www.lucent.com/news_events/merg.html
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
From the patent:
a means responsive to the digital video input signal for producing a field frame coding type signal which directs a selected one, but not both, of the frame coding means or the field coding means to code the digital video input signal.Wait, let me see if I'm reading this right. They're going after people who use MPEG2 because they patented the interlace bit? You've gotta be out of your freaking mind! Can anyone really own a patent to add a single bit to a frame that says 0=progressive, 1=interlaced?
I don't see how this could possibly hold up, being a patent from 1993. There were video codecs before 1993, and surely they all had information stored in each frame that described how to decode the frame. Storing whether or not the frame is interlaced isn't enough of an advance from just generically storing frame information to warant a patent, and it never should've been granted.
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.