Alcatel, the French manufacturer of telecommunications gear, has filed two separate complaints against Microsoft in a Texas court, claiming that Microsoft has infringed on seven Alcatel patents. The court documents do not give examples of Microsoft's alleged bad behavior, but we can get some idea of what's at stake by looking at the cited patents.
Several of the patents in question have to do with video decoding and processing. Patent 5,659,539, for instance, was granted back in 1997 and covers a "Method and Apparatus for Frame Accurate Access of Digital Audio-Video Information." It describes a system for playing back video at a "second presentation rate" even when the stream was encoded for viewing at a "first presentation rate." Several other patents cover similar concepts.
The target may well be Microsoft's own IPTV middleware programs, which rely on accurately navigating within compressed digital files in order to keep streams synchronized and to offer services like video on demand. The Microsoft IPTV stack has become one of the most popular for worldwide IPTV deployments, and Alcatel may want a piece of the licensing money. But the target could just as easily be the Xbox 360.
That's because Alcatel is in the process of merging with Lucent, which is currently fighting its own legal battle with Microsoft over the video decoding capabilities found in the 360. In a court filing back in March, Lucent claimed that Microsoft was infringing Lucent patents by including "'out of the box' MPEG-2 decoding capability" in the console.
Alcatel's own patent infringement claims mesh well with the Lucent case. Several of the patents deal with video processing and decoding, and MPEG processing is explicitly mentioned in several cases. But other patents are more opaque. Two deal with a "Deterministic User Authentication Service for Communication Network" designed to allow personal network connectivity to users of large institutional networks. Is this a shot at Xbox Live? IPTV? Vista? This second court case is less clear, and Alcatel isn't giving more details than necessary.
The company said in a statement that it has been in licensing talks with Microsoft, but that the talks had recently broken off. Alcatel is asking the judge for triple damages based on a claim of "willful infringement" by Microsoft. Microsoft has yet to file a response.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061122-8272.html
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