Lucent Sues Microsoft, Wants All 360s Recalled

[Dominus Atheos]

Lucent, a technology company, has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and is demanding that the Big M pull all Xbox 360s from the market. The lawsuit, which was previously filed by Lucent against Microsoft, was ruled in favor of Microsoft, not on legal grounds, but because of a typographical error in Lucent’s patent papers. The presiding judge over the case advised Lucent to resubmit their lawsuit at a later date, with the error corrected.

Lucent claims that Microsoft has violated patent laws which have to do with the 360’s MPEG2 decoder. The decoder is used to facilitate certain video routines in the Xbox 360. The decoder, Lucent claims, is patented by them. The original patent was filed in 1993.

While it is highly unlikely for all 360s to be pulled from shelves, Lucent is using this threat to gain leverage to win their case — in court or out of court.

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[DPDarkPrimus]

I actually saw some Premium systems in the store a couple days ago.

[Mr Bean]

People need to learn, Microsoft has access to a legion of Ninja-Robot Lawyers who ride T-Rex's into Court and used to be Pirates. Moreover any sane judge will tell Lucent to shut the hell up and sit down. They might have claim. The fact their claim got tossed because of typo's means they never realy looked at the acutal claim that well. But frankly this is on line with asking Ford to recall all Explorer's because the airfilter's design was patiente'd by Honeywell.

[Stark]

I figure their plan is to simply pose a threat: Microsoft doesn't want their 360 distribution interrupted by court order - even for a day or two - so they'll settle out of court if there's even a CHANCE the claim could have merit. Free money for Lucent, basically.