A federal jury in San Diego has ordered Microsoft to pay some $1.52 billion in damages to Alcatel-Lucent SA for violating two patents related to converting audio to the MP3 digital music format on computers.
The suit involves MP3 playback technology which has shipped with Windows since 2003. The MP3 compression technology was jointly developed by Germany’s Fraunhofer and the former Bell Laboratories, although the first MP3 encoding product came from Fraunhofer in 1994. The former AT&T spun Bell Labs off into Lucent Technologies back in 1995; Alcatel acquired Lucent in April 2006.
