Microsoft Countersues Lucent Over Xbox 360 -- Posted by XanTium on May 16 18:48 EST
From betanews.com:
[QUOTE]
Microsoft struck back at Lucent late Monday, filing a countersuit in an attempt to have the company's patent infringement lawsuit dismissed. Additionally, it accused Lucent of violating several Microsoft patents.

Lucent claims video decoding technology within the Xbox 360 infringes on its patents. It said Microsoft had failed to license the next generation system, and filed suit in April.

In the countersuit, Microsoft claims that two patents from Lucent are not valid, as well as accusing the communications equipment company of infringing on the Redmond company's own patents. A spokesperson for Microsoft expressed disappointment that Lucent had chosen litigation over negotiations.
[/QUOTE]

Read More: betanews.com

interesting

huh? Who cares, Miicrosoft certianly has enough money to pay the guy off if they loose. But i dont quite get what patents there sueing eachother for.

Good, I hope MS buries them, then digs them up and buys all their patents for pennies.

edit: yep its corporate trash-can digging at its best.

This is why big companies keep so many patents... when they get sued, they can easily counter-sue. This is exactly what Intel does. They also have engineers reverse engineer competitor products to see if there are any infringements in case they want to sue or in case they need to counter-sue.

Man, the day of tomorrow I will be careful when drinking a cola, there is the chance than the way I drink it is patented and I could get sued.

Everybody sued everyone today, that sucks.

Agreed. There are WAY too many silly patents out there. I browsed through a bunch of them once and was shocked at the types of things that can be patented. It just leads to crap like this. I like the one patent (I think it might be Creative Labs who owns it) on the way to "search for music using MP3 ID tags". Yeah, that's really original. Nobody would EVER think of searching on a field like "song name" or "artist". That's a totally novel idea !

I patented sueing people for breaking patent laws .

Patents are a real tricky thing.

I'm working on a patent proposal for work and the main thing the lawyers tell you is to make it as broad as possible without being too vague. (That way, another company can't look at your patent and figure a way to use a similar design for something else.)

One of the examples they gave was a guy who wondered why the auto industry doesn't have sensors on top of cars to make sure no one drives away with a baby or soda on the roof of their car. He made a patent proposal, and the lawyer suggested broadening the proposal to cover not just the roof, but the sides of the car as wel...so now, IBM has a patent on that. A lot of patents fall under "Let's patent this, so if someone else tries to make something similar, we can profit."

Honestly, it can be kinda fun to browse through patents and see some of the goofy ones...

yeah, i have done that before. its amazing what people patent. i hope Lucent wins over MS, the laws the law. if MS infriged their patent, then they have to pay. none of this counter sue crap.

i think i am going to patent touching myself, so i can sue all of you.
I accept paypal.

This is awsome, lmao.

Its slightly more in depth than that, they made the programming technology on mp3 players that can read metafiles (ID3 v1 and v2) tags and organize based on that. Instead of going by folders. Its still pretty basic but not when they got the patent for it.

Indeed. These large patent portfolios do there jobs well, too. Part of the reason the desktop market doesn't have a patent war going on, is because *Everyone* would loose. MS, Apple, and OIN (*nix) all have huge patent portfolios. Should they start going at it, they would probably destory themselfs, and take a large portion of the US patent system with it. There are alot of paralles with the Cold War. No body wants a patent war, but all the big players are in a sort of arms race to aquire more patents.

The best way to stay afloat? Get patents. The easiest way to get patents? Wipe out a small company. Best way to do that? Use your patents. It's a crazy legal system.