Technology: Lucent vs. Microsoft

Just last month (March), a lawsuit was filed against Microsoft by Lucent,
a telecommunications company. The lawsuit is over the MPEG-2 digital video compression algorithms used in DVD playback. The company has previously sued Dell and several other companies, but has always lost due to a technical loophole. Now that Lucent has patched up the patent, several questions hang around: How strong is the case, and if Lucent wins, what will it mean for Microsoft and the open source community?

The case is over patent number 5,227,878, (called Adaptive Coding and Decoding of Frames and Fields of Video) given to Lucent in 1993. The demand is that Microsoft pays for as-of-yet unreleased damages, and removes all Xbox 360 units from sales world-wide. If this lawsuit passes, the soonest that it would be enacted would be about two years from now, past the product maturity point. The U.S. Patent Office does indeed have this compression patent registered to Lucent. If, in fact, Lucent does have a patent on the exact method used in the Xbox 360, this could cause trouble for not only Microsoft, but also for the open source community.

To Microsoft, the issue isn't the lawsuit money, but the loss of legal ability to sell the Xbox 360. It has been sued before by large companies, such as Sun Microsystems, without a huge dent in funds. However, the Xbox 360 is a large product for Microsoft, and the loss of ability to sell units would come as a huge blow to them, in both sales and credibility. Doubtless, they would re-release it without the MPEG-2 compression system, but in doing so they would lose the capability to play DVDs and have high-quality cinematic movie compression, both star features in any game console system. This pause in Microsoft's war machine could allow competitors such as Sony to pull ahead. But Microsoft has huge funds, and although this loss would be one of their biggest, they would still survive and thrive. But how would this effect the open-source Linux community? We shall cover this problem next.

The Linux community has had copyright problems recently, due to popular proprietary formats such as mp3 and DVD encryption. How severe would this blow be to them? My guess is that it would hurt the short term popularity of Linux, as MPEG-2 is an integral portion of any form of the already patent-encumbered DVD playback. However, beyond this problem, it would have little effect because DVD is really the only usage of the MPEG-2 algorithm. Even now, DVD is losing it's edge as competing technology gears up, such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. These will probably use a different compression algorithm, thus rendering the lawsuit moot in the long run.

More info:
Lucent Patent (103)
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