On Saturday 24 February 2007 12:51, Damon Register wrote: > As much as I dislike MS, I still want to see justice and fairness. > When you are finished laughing, can anyone explain this? I have read > the link and others but I must be missing something. If MS paid > Fraunhofer what's the beef? Alcatel-Lucent thinks the money should > have been paid to them instead?
I think it shows the wisdom of Novell's and other distros' decision to tread warily in this crappy software patent stuff. The only sensible thing is to go for free formats, and if anything good comes out of this debacle it will make companies put this higher up the priority list. Basically, Fraunhofer was taken to be the licensor, since it had the patent on the compression technology, so they were the ones everyone paid. But Lucent also claimed a patent on some part of mp3 (I don't know whether it was the compression or something else), and decided to sue Gateway and Dell for damages, in that they were providing equipment that allowed people to listen to mp3s. Microsoft stepped in, on the basis that it was their software that was actually playing the mp3s, and Alcatel took over the suit when they bought Lucent. Microsoft has now been told to pay $1.5bn to Alcatel-Lucent, which is indeed a bit unbalanced, since they only paid Fraunhofer $16m for a license. I actually sympathise with Microsoft here - they paid whoever it was they (and the world and his dog) thought they should pay here, and then someone else comes out of the woodwork to claim 100 times that. Who's to say there won't be more patent-holders appearing, each looking for some dosh? So Software Patents Are A Bad Thing, only free formats offer a pain-free way of delivering or listening to multimedia, US courts sometimes (always?) give peculiar judgements, and poor old Microsoft needs to spend more money on lawyers. I wonder how long it will be before big companies (they're the ones who actually make the juiciest targets) conclude that software patents are more bother than they're worth, and start lobbying against them? -- Pob hwyl / Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.kyfieithu.co.uk - KDE yn Gymraeg www.klebran.org.uk - Gwirydd gramadeg rhydd i'r Gymraeg www.eurfa.org.uk - Geiriadur rhydd i'r Gymraeg www.rhedadur.org.uk - Rhedeg berfau Cymraeg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
