If you wanna make an omelet, you gotta break a few legs ...

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: February 26, 2007 1:29:43 AM JST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] If you wanna make an omelet, you gotta break a  
few legs ...
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

[Note:  This item comes from reader Randall.  DLH]

From: Randall <rvh40 () insightbb com>
Date: February 24, 2007 9:34:00 AM PST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>, dewayne () warpspeed com
Subject: If you wanna make an omelet, you gotta break a few legs ...

http://htdaw.blogsource.com/post.mhtml?post_id=431345

Saturday, February 24, 2007 at 12:31 PM EST
FORMER BELL LABS RESEARCHER PLAYED ROLE IN MICROSOFT PATENT CASE

By John Letzing

5:38 PM ET Feb 23, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- A Microsoft Corp. employee who was  
awarded patents for digital audio technology while a researcher with  
Bell Labs in the 1990s played a
role in Thursday's $1.5 billion jury verdict against Microsoft for  
violating those same patents. James Johnston, now a researcher with  
Microsoft, testified as a witness during the
trial, held in U.S. District Court in San Diego, according to a  
Microsoft spokesman.

While at Bell Labs, a predecessor to Lucent Technologies, now part of  
Alcatel-Lucent,  Johnston developed or co-developed the two patents  
related to digital music
technology, according to filings with the U.S. Patent Office.

Microsoft argued that the patents asserted were unrelated to the  
widely-used digital audio technology known as MP3. Microsoft deputy  
general counsel Tom Burt said the intellectual property licensed by  
Microsoft from the Fraunhofer Institute, a German research firm, is  
separate from the two patents asserted by Alcatel-Lucent and  
developed by Johnston.

"We don't think these two [Alcatel-Lucent] patents have anything to  
do with MP3," Burt said in an interview. Instead, Burt asserted that  
the patents relate to the
so-called AAC audio compression format. See related story

The Fraunhofer Institute's patent representative, French company  
Thomson SA, released a statement Friday saying their MP3 patents are  
totally unrelated to those
Alcatel-Lucent asserted in the San Diego trial. The Fraunhofer  
Institute originally developed its MP3 technology together with Bell
Labs, an Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman said. She declined to comment on  
Johnston's role in the trial, which ended with a jury deciding that  
Microsoft's Windows Media Player
software used technology that infringed on digital audio patents  
owned by Alcatel-Lucent.

The Microsoft spokesman said Johnston was not involved in  
implementing the MP3 technology in question in Microsoft products,  
even though Alcatel's lawyers made that
connection for the jury.

Burt said Microsoft originally paid a one-time, $16 million fee for  
licenses to Fraunhofer patents, including those for MP3 technology.  
Burt said that while Bell Labs came away from its joint research  
project with Fraunhofer with patents related to AAC, Fraunhofer came  
away with purely MP3 patents.

"There's lots of formats out there but the Fraunhofer people did mp3,  
and the Lucent/Bell team worked on something different," Burt said.  
The Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman said only that "The jury determined  
that these patents were developed by Bell Labs and not in  
cooperation," and declined to comment further. Alcatel agreed to  
acquire Bell Labs successor Lucent for $13.5 billion in stock last year.

The patents developed at least in part by Johnston were assigned to  
AT&T Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies, and were issued in  
1994 and 1997, respectively.

The first patent describes technology used for "transmission of  
signals and in recording for reproduction, particularly recording and  
reproduction of music," while
the second describes technology for encoding audio signals.

The Microsoft spokesman said Johnston is now working for Microsoft's  
Codecs department, which is developing future products to be used by  
Ford Motor Co. in its
voice-command and entertainment systems.

<http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/ex-bell-labs-researcher-played- 
role/story.aspx?guid={6D73DA9E-AA07-4A2B-9D2B-25C7815974A3} 
&siteid=myyahoo&dist=myyahoo>



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