Microsoft's Xbox 360 console contains illegally used technology, Lucent alleged last week - and filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the software giant to back up its claim. It is seeking unspecified damages and a jury trial. The complaint, filed with the US District Court in San Diego on 28 March, alleges the Xbox 360's MPEG 2 decoder uses techniques outlined in patent number 5,227,878, which is owned by Lucent and details an system for "adaptive coding and decoding of frames and fields of video". Microsoft, said Lucent's suit, does not have permission to use this technology. Lucent said it had notified Microsoft of the alleged infringement, but the console company did not suspend sales of the Xbox 360 or, presumably, offer to license the technology for a royalty acceptable to Lucent. Lucent sued Microsoft in 2003 for infringement of the same patent, but the software giant was able to persuade the judge to throw out the case because of a typo in the patent's wording. Lucent has since edited the text, and is now having another go at prosecuting Microsoft. ® Source : http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/04/05/lucent_sues_microsoft/
a typo? the Law is quite elastic in the US of A i see. such a mere detail wouldn't be persuasive in the UK courts at all. heh
MS can then say that Lucent edited the patent so that MS would purposely infringe on Lucents updated patent..
A typo? You've then got to ask yourself, what kind of company makes typos in multi-million dollar patents?
For one thing, the companies themselves rarely write the patent. That job is reserved for the (ridiculously) overpaid patent lawyers. Half the time the lawyer doesn't even draft the damn thing and it is left to a paralegal. Now of course, you can't expect the paralegal to actually type it up either, so they outsource that function to those "Make money at home in your spare time as a legal transcriptionist" schemes. So it is really unemployed "Bob" down the street who only knows that the difference between an MPEG and a beer keg is that he can get drunk off of one, and horny off the other. Seriously though, most patent applications are misworded, grammatically incorrect, full of typos, have out of date or incorrect illustrations, or otherwise aren't actually talking about what the original copy intended to patent.
Typo's kill everything in the US. If you get a ticket from a cop w/ a typo on it (specificaly in the name, time, or basicaly anyway) the ticket is thrown out (if you're smart enough).
I hope Microsoft gets screwed by this, counting that Lucent approached them and requested that they abide by their patent, if the little guy gets screwed by patents (and microsoft has done there fair share of patent related screwing) then I think it's only fair Microsoft do. I suspect this will end in a undisclosed out of court settlement.
Though I'd like to see Microsoft get screwed, and agree that this will be settled out of court... This is Lucent...they're definitely not the little guy. They just look little because Microsoft is so fucking huge. It's not like they're gonna be put out of business.
The patent seems rediculous to me... microsoft already liscensed the dvd decoding patent from another company (thomson). It would be thomson infringing on lucent's patent, but unfortunately thomson has prior art, so lucent won't go after them.
