Wired: Jury Orders Microsoft to Pay $1.52B
SEATTLE (AP) — Microsoft Corp. must pay $1.52 billion in damages to telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent SA for violating two patents related to digital music, a federal jury ruled Thursday. …
Well, so much for the Gates kids' allowance this week.
So while all this fuss is going on. The free software community (which years ago realized mp3s were patent encumbered and going to be a mess) has a great solution the Ogg Vorbis format. A technically better format, patent unencumbered, and with open source reference implementations for a variety of platforms.
check it out @ http://www.vorbis.com/
So if these licenses mean more companies will not include mp3 support in their software/hardware (the cost is quite high) then what will you do with the library of songs you have ripped? Open formats mean that your data will still be useful no matter what lawyers do.
I think this means that either the prices for licenses will come down or companies will switch to the Ogg Vorbis format. Those controlling the licenses will be forced to demonstrate what value they add over going with Ogg Vorbis. Then the market players will decide. (Personally, I am pulling for Ogg Vorbis.)
BTW, Nate. I was waiting for you after I posted this. It took you longer to comment than I was anticipating.
🙂
Hmm, the market might work in the end. But this is also an example of companies using submarine patents to extort large sums of money … and I am not sure that is a good thing. Companies that wait until a format has become a standard and then start trying to extract a toll from everyone in the ecosystem end up harming the ecosystem/market.
Yeah, we are back to the underlying philosophical/economic question about whether code should be copyrighted thing or not. Yet when you think about it Microsoft has only bet at this code lock-up came for about twenty years or so. The thing that may undo protected code is not legislation or the courts, but the market. It far from certain to me that Microsoft wins in the end.
“extract a toll from everyone in the ecosystem end up harming the ecosystem/market.”
But that would only be true if the protected code does not bring added value and no open source code is allowed to compete. If protected code does bring value in competition with an open source envrionment, and protection is denied, then the eco-system is also harmed.
One plausible strategy is to let the two species duke it out and see which prevails.
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