Mistaks, shurely
"...hundreds of other companies who purchased the rights to sue MP3 technology from Fraunhofer."
Shurely shome Freudian mistake.. you may mean "use", not "sue"?
Microsoft is reviewing its legal options after a US court ordered it to pay Alcatel $1.5bn for infringing the French telecoms' company's MP3 technology in Windows. Microsoft slammed the court's ruling, calling it "completely unsupported by the law or the facts," and claimed it had paid $16m to license the voice technology in …
If you wonder why the likes of RedHat abandoned
mp3 format ages ago , there you have it.
OggVorbis is free and sounds better .. so ..
after reading this and knowing what we do about
the mess .. can we blame them ?
No .. personally i beleive that move to be right
and that mp3 which is a horrible sounding format
should just be abandoned and the switch to ogg done
for all player types.
Ric
/me steps off the soapbox
Shouldnt A-L have been suing the company M$ had been paying to use the patent for selling stuff that wasnt theirs?
Is this the start of serious prosecutions for buying, unwittingly, stolen property?
I take it that M$ can now sue the company they've been paying, thus casing more cash to flow to the Lawyers.... Why are they always the ones who win?
First and foremost. Alactel purchased "Fraunhofer" and the patents that came with the MP3 format. I am confused as to why they do not have to uphold the contracts made by that company?
So basically they get a judgment saying everyone that has used that particular patent since the purchase they can chase down?
And this is the reason patents are completely inane. They serve no purpose other than to make money for large corporations. Thankfully MS will tie them up in Appeals Court and Litigation for another 3 years. By then the next great format will be out. So I suppose Apple will sue Microsoft / Gnome and KDE for stealing the idea to make software look nice. heh!