A federal judge signed off on a $1.53 billion jury verdict in favor of Alcatel-Lucent in a digital music patent dispute against Microsoft.Judge Rudi M. Brewster of Federal District Court in San Diego concluded that Microsoft’s Windows Media Player software infringed on patents owned by Lucent Technologies, an American telecommunications equipment maker acquired last year by Alcatel of France.

The damages were awarded by a jury in February.

A Microsoft spokesman, Guy Esnouf, said the company would challenge the ruling during a June 20 hearing, citing a Supreme Court ruling earlier this week in favor of Microsoft in a patent lawsuit brought by AT&T. The company claimed computers running the Windows operating system infringed on AT&T technology for a digital speech coder system.

The high court found that patent law did not apply to software sent to foreign countries.

It also rejected AT&T’s contention that it was entitled to damages for every Windows-based computer manufactured outside the United States using the speech technology.

Mary Lou Ambrus, a spokeswoman for Alcatel-Lucent, said the company was pleased with Brewster’s ruling on its case.

“Alcatel-Lucent views its intellectual property as a vital asset and will continue to preserve and defend these assets,” she said.

In 2003, Lucent filed 15 patent claims against Gateway and Dell for technology developed by Bell Labs, its research arm.

In April 2003, Microsoft added itself to the list of defendants, saying the patents were closely tied to its Windows operating system.

A judge threw out two of the 2003 patent claims and scheduled six separate trials to consider the remaining disputes. The PC makers are still defendants.

In the latest trial, Microsoft disputed that Alcatel-Lucent’s patents govern its MP3 encoding and decoding tools, and said it licensed the MP3 software used by its Windows Media Player from Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a German company.

A lawsuit over two patents for computer user-interface technology brought by Lucent against Microsoft, Dell and Gateway, is due to go to trial May 21, Ambrus said.

Shares of Microsoft rose 42 cents to $30.61 on Wednesday. Alcatel-Lucent’s stock added 7 cents to $13.37.

Source: The New York Times

APPLE’S CHIEF CALLS FOR END TO MUSIC COPY PROTECTION

 

By MICHAEL J. de la MERCED

Published: February 7, 2007

The chief executive of Apple Inc., Steven P. Jobs, is calling on the four largest music companies to license their music for distribution without digital anti-piracy protection, shifting away from a nearly four-year-old philosophy that helped steer the iPod music player to worldwide success.

Mr. Jobs’s appeal, expressed Tuesday in a letter posted on Apple’s Web site, arrives as the company, whose iPod dominates MP3 player sales, faces a slew of lawsuits in Europe over so-called digital rights management. France, Sweden and Germany are among the countries that have accused Apple of hurting customers by locking rival players out of its iTunes service.

It is a striking move for Mr. Jobs and for Apple, whose resurgence as a dominant technology company was built on the success of the iPod and iTunes. Introduced in 2003 as the iTunes Music Store, the service charges users 99 cents to download songs from the major labels. Its promise of copyright protection, called FairPlay, helped persuade the four major labels — the EMI Group, Universal, Sony BMG and the Warner Music Group — to allow online sales.

Consumers took to the system in droves, letting Apple capture nearly 75 percent of the portable music player market.

For the first quarter, Apple reported $1 billion in profit, stemming largely from sales of 21 million iPods. Customers have downloaded more than two billion songs from the iTunes store.

Since then, several other providers have devised their own proprietary systems. Microsoft first created its PlaysForSure system, used by a variety of music player makers. But as that system failed to dent iPod sales, the company then turned to its own digital-rights management system for its Zune player last year.

Yet the second-largest online music store, eMusic.com, does not use digital rights management. It heralded its 100 millionth download late last year. Though the store features songs from major artists and what the service claims is 13,000 music labels worldwide, it has not signed agreements with the major music labels.

In his letter, Mr. Jobs outlined three avenues for the future of digital music. One is maintaining the status quo, in which he said customers are “well served” by a variety of choices in players and stores.

Another would see Apple licensing its FairPlay system to other manufacturers, allowing other players to play iTunes songs and vice versa. But he said that system would only complicate enforcement of digital rights management, as myriad companies would have to coordinate software and hardware updates.

Finally, labels could shed digital rights management altogether. Mr. Jobs pointed out that the vast majority of music bought today — only 10 percent of all music sold last year was through an online store — has no copyright protections and freely allows consumers to copy music to their computers. Attaching digital rights management to music bought online has only limited the number of online music stores, he wrote.

“This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat,” he wrote.