A U.S. federal jury found Alcatel-Lucentto, in a dispute with Microsoft, to be the rightful owner of technology used for the MP3 process. Microsoft's lawyers have said they will appeal both the jury's finding that the company infringed on the patents and the amount of its award to Alcatel-Lucent.
Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster who teaches at Stanford University, said he thought there was a good chance that the verdict would be overturned.One of the patents involved "is for a method of analyzing sound to gauge whether it is more like music or noise, then representing it in digital form based on that determination. The other patent pertains to the process for determining whether the sound is audible to the human ear and then converting only that audible part into digital form." Both were developed at Bell Laboratories, which later became part of Lucent Technologies, which in turn was bought by Alcatel.
"Hundreds of companies that thought they had properly licensed the MP3 format from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, which was also involved in developing the MP3 technology, could be financially liable for infringing on Alcatel-Lucent's patents."
No comments:
Post a Comment