Lucent Sues Microsoft over Xbox 360

Copying ideas and, dare I say, reverse engineering are a lot more common in programming than some people think.

 

Errrrr... coca cola's formula would not be patentable anyway.

Are you implying that IBM's research group is not a truly smart company?

 

I guess from this common sense principle comes the phenomenon we know as Middleware.

Not making a call on this though. I'm no lawyer though. Handily my brother is and specialises in patents (not sure exactly what type though). I'll consult him for his views.

 

Well, the sad but obvious fact is that in the last 50 or so years, patents has become a major cashcow for large to medium size corporations, going against everything patents was invented for in the first place.
Not filing for patent is not the "smart thing" to do from a classic commercial/capitalistic standpoint, but it is the Right Thing (TM) to do, both from a moral standpoint and with the overall long term well being of the industry in sight.

 

Hey the way I see it, if Sony and every other DVD player manufacturer of even 40$ walmart DVD players can make a Decoder that's non-infringement, why does MS have to steal tech from 1993!
and they did it for xbox and knowingly kept it in the 360?? for that they should loose because of thier ignorance.

thats my 2 cents

 

I don't think that fair. Though this is going outside the realm of this forums discussion, I'll just say that when someone has invested substantial amounts to develop a new tech, and someone else is free to copy it, that's not right. The Dyson vaccuum cleaner is an example where an inability to afford to upkeep the patent for 1 year saw the tech which he invested, very heavily at personal risk, was free for anyone to use.

Personally I think the patent system should be such that you cannot prevent someone using your idea, but they have to pay royalties (capped at something sensible) so that the whole of humanity can share in new ideas while developers can still make returns on their investments. At the moment two competing companies can develop two competing useful features that the public would want at the same time in one product, but that won't happen as long as the features won't be shared.

 

Yes, because it is Microsoft, if they infringed a patent then they must have done it knowingly by trawling the patent database for something to steal and implement in one of their products

One thing I dont understand is this appears to be an MPEG2 decoding issue. Is this done in software on the Xbox and 360? I thought it was hardware decoding which would have been on nvidias hardware in the xbox and atis in the 360. If it is a hardware issue then thats 2 seperate hardware suppliers that have infringed - is this the first of many lawsuits? If it is a software decoder then it shouldnt be too difficult for MS to fix it for future releases.

Most of the patent seems to cover encoding which looks like MPEG2 with some extra bells and whistles to improve encoding for HD formats. The decoder just supports the extra bells and whistles and uses different decoding paths by taking hints from the stream. Now the xbox only supported standard MPEG2(?), if so this may be to do with how the decoder can output directly to different resolutions instead of scaling after decoding. (If the xbox does that)

Either way I find it hard to believe that MS are going to be the only ones to fall foul of this if Lucent win the case.

 

There is no MPEG2 decoder in the NV2A GPU (xbox), and most likely not in xenos (360) either. There just isn't any point in putting in dedicated hardware for something that is so computationally non-intensive as DVD MPEG2 playback. You wouldn't occupy more than maybe 2% of CPU resources (5% at the very most) in the 360 to play back a DVD movie, so what would be the point of having special hardware for it?

 

The writ is now available.

The writ centres around the following two claims of the patent:

From what I remember from uni these are pretty central to MPEG2 decoding and all decoders would need to implement them. Has MS just "forgoten" to pay a licensing fee somewhere along the lines?

 

like the jpeg patent, let everyone use it for a decade and then sue all of em, starting with a big company.

 

More likely MS is just the biggest richest most convenient target to fire the lawyers at right now.