$ 1.5 billion fine in favor of Alcatel-Lucent

The US Federal Court in San Diego ruled in the case of Alcatel-Lucent against Microsoft, in which the latter was accused of violating the license to use the MP3 audio format. The judge ordered Microsoft to pay the claimant company $ 1.52 billion in compensation for the fact that MP3 encoding was supported by the Windows media player built into the OS.

The story that preceded this judgment began in 2003, when Lucent (then not yet purchased Alcatel) filed several lawsuits against PC makers for their alleged use of the company's patented technologies. Microsoft, which had legal protection agreements with Lucent's opponents, stood up for them in court.

As a result, she also received subpoenas. The lawsuits contained claims about the XBox 360 (which used a number of licensed solutions from Lucent from the old XBox, although such continuity was not clearly defined in the contract between the two companies) and MP3 audio compression technology, which MS licensed from the Fraunhofer Institute, but “ I forgot to ask permission from its second coauthor, Bell Labs, which has been owned by Lucent since 2005.
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Microsoft plans to appeal this decision, first from the same judge, and then, if necessary, to appeal.

via WSJ