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.

Comments

Not at all comfortable with the implications ..

[Entropy]

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.

All 360s?

[JoeShmoe]

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
.

Re:The continuing problem of patents...

[gameforge]

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.

M.A.D. Software Patents

[Phat_Tony]

I thought that, among huge companies, the current insane state of the patent system functioned the way the superpowers did in the cold war- under the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. Since they all have thousands of patents covering every inane and obvious aspect of doing anything from writing software to building jets to flipping a hamburger to taking a piss, I thought they couldn't afford to start suing one another, because any suit would be met with a dozen counter-suits, and both companies would be assuring the annihilation of their profits into a bloody cataclysm of endless legal fees.

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?