Alcatel-Lucent selfish monopoly wanna-be

[EverBlue]

Alcatel Lucent is going to sue everyone that has used .mp3 files. Because theyre too sorry to make money on their own. I hope those bastards go down in court like the scum they are during the appeal. Whether you believe it or not, karma is a bitch. And it will come after you much worse. This thread cannot be complete without insulting their not-so-dropped testicles.

http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/w ... microsoft/

[cavagnaro]

Ok...the question for you is: do you know that microsoft is also a huge law breaker? Also tries to do monopoly even they say no? That UE has make them pay huge ammount of euros for breaking laws?
So if Microsoft steals Copyright Alcatel is the bad one?
I don't agree with the idea that they will sue everyone, but a thief who steal to a thief is forgiven

[frank]

THere is a great article on wikipedia, about the MP3 format.
Here is a little bit about the license:


Thomson Consumer Electronics controls licensing of the MPEG-1/2 Layer 3 patents in many countries, including the United States, Japan, Canada and EU countries[6]. Thomson has been actively enforcing these patents. Due to different practices in different European countries when granting patents for computer-implemented inventions under the European Patent Convention, it is unclear whether the patents would be upheld by national European courts.

For current information about Fraunhofer IIS and Thomson's patent portfolio and licensing terms and fees see their website mp3licensing.com. MP3 license revenues generated ca. 100 million Euro revenue to the Fraunhofer Society in 2005. [7]

In September 1998, the Fraunhofer Institute sent a letter to several developers of MP3 software stating that a license was required to "distribute and/or sell decoders and/or encoders". The letter claimed that unlicensed products "infringe the patent rights of Fraunhofer and THOMSON. To make, sell and/or distribute products using the [MPEG Layer-3] standard and thus our patents, you need to obtain a license under these patents from us." [8]

These patent issues significantly slowed the development of unlicensed MP3 software [citation needed] and led to increased focus on creating and popularizing alternatives such as WMA and Ogg Vorbis. Microsoft, the makers of the Windows operating system, chose to move away from MP3 to their own proprietary Windows Media formats to avoid the licensing issues associated with the patents [citation needed]. Until the key patents expire, unlicensed encoders and players appear to be infringing articles in countries that recognize those patents.

In spite of the patent restrictions, the perpetuation of the MP3 format continues; the reasons for this appear to be the network effects caused by:

familiarity with the format,
the large quantity of music now available in the MP3 format,
the wide variety of existing software and hardware that takes advantage of the file format,
the lack of DRM restrictions, which makes MP3 files easy to edit, copy and distribute over networks,
the majority of home users not knowing or not caring about the patents controversy, which is in general irrelevant to their choice of the music format for personal use.
Additionally, patent holders declined to enforce license fees on open source decoders, allowing many free MP3 decoders to develop. [citation needed] Furthermore, while attempts have been made to discourage distribution of encoder binaries, Thomson has stated that individuals using free MP3 encoders are not required to pay fees. Thus while patent fees have been an issue for companies attempting to use MP3, they have not meaningfully impacted users, allowing the format to grow in popularity.

Sisvel S.p.A. [9] and its US subsidiary Audio MPEG, Inc. [10] previously sued Thomson for patent infringement on MP3 technology[11], but those disputes were resolved in November 2005 with Sisvel granting Thomson a license to their patents. Motorola also recently signed with Audio MPEG to license MP3-related patents. With Thomson and Sisvel both owning separate patents which they claim are needed by the codec, the legal status of MP3 remains unclear.

In September 2006 German officials seized MP3 players from SanDisk's booth at the IFA show in Berlin after an Italian patents firm won an injunction against the company in a dispute over licencing rights. The injunction was later reversed by a Berlin judge [12]; but that reversal was in turn blocked the same day by another judge from the same court, "bringing the Patent Wild West to Germany" in the words of one commentator. [13].

Alcatel-Lucent also claims ownership of several patents relating to MP3 encoding and compression. In November 2006, (prior to the companies' merger) Alcatel filed a lawsuit against Microsoft (see Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft), alleging infringment of seven of its patents. On February 23, 2007 a San Diego court upheld the suit, and awarded Alcatel-Lucent a record-breaking $1.52bn in damages.[1] Microsoft has said it will appeal the verdict, maintaining that the federal jury's decision is "unsupported by the law or facts", since Microsoft had already paid $16m to license the technology from Fraunhofer IIS which, it claims, is "the industry-recognized rightful licensor".

[knightr1der]

Frank, you should change your signature....

"Code free, or make a dodgy patent and a few billion bucks, or die"

I know which one I would choose

Do I have any sympathy for MS? Hell no!