Microsoft and the patent damages.

Apparently Alcatel Lucent owns patents on MP3 files and players, which is why Microsoft has been hit with damages of over $1.5 billion:

A U.S. federal jury found that Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) infringed audio patents held by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) (ALU.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and should pay $1.52 billion in damages, the No. 1 software maker said on Thursday.

Microsoft said it plans to first ask the trial judge to knock down the ruling and will appeal if necessary. It said the verdict is unsupported by the law and that it had already licensed the technology in question from Germany's Fraunhofer.

Alcatel-Lucent had accused the world's biggest software maker of infringing patents related to standards used for playing MP3 digital music files.

If this judgement stands then Alcatel may well go after other people as well, like Apple: and any damages would be far more wounding to the smaller company which relies upon iPods in a way that Microsoft does not rely upon audio products.

China Relaxes Censorship

China has relaxed their censorship of two Taiwanese newspapers:

China has allowed access to Internet versions of two of Taiwan's top daily newspapers after blocking them for years for fear they would spread anti-Communist propaganda, a Taiwan official said on Monday.

Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council said that users in the populous Pearl River Delta and other parts of China over the past two weeks had accessed previously blocked Web sites run by the China Times (news.chinatimes.com) and the United Daily News (http://udn.com/NEWS/)

A search of the sites in Beijing found the United Daily was accessible but the China Times was still blocked.

A welcome sign of course but still a long long way to go before China can be said to have anything resembling free speech.

 

Technorati tags: Taiwan, China

Clever People In Scotland

Sigh. If you're going to go out and commit a crime maybe you might want to tell your mates not to video it and then post it to YouTube?

Police investigating an incident last December in which 15 to 20 youths trashed a Edinburgh Burger King were given an unexpected helping hand when readers of a local paper tracked down footage of the outrage on YouTube.

According to the Evening News, one of the gang used his mobile phone to film his pals "hurling chairs and exchanging punches as terrified staff cowered behind the counter". The miscreants fled before police could intervene, but the cameraman later rather brilliantly posted a one minute, 30 second clip of the carnage on YouTube.

Dim or what?

Technorati tags: You Tube, Scotland, criminals, idiot

PS3 Shipments

Looks like Sony might not be able to make it's forecast shipments for the PS3: 

 

Sony's plan to ship 2m PlayStation 3 consoles worldwide by the end of the year and a further 4m PS3s by the end of March 2007 is still "within our reach", company President Ryoji Chubachi told reporters this week.

Chubachi admitted Sony's efforts had been hindered by the limited availability of the blue lasers used within the console to read Blu-ray Discs and game media, an issue that ensured PS3 mass production didn't begin as a soon as the company had hoped.

It's the blue lasers that are a problem, is it? That must mean a shortage of gallium nitride. Can't see why there'd be any shortage of that though. Maybe it's just the manufacturing capcity?

 

Technorati tags: Sony, PS3, Blue laser, GaN

Nokia 9290

The Nokia 9290 is a mobile phone for the US market.

The technical specifications are as follows:

Introducing the Nokia 9290 Communicator, the one device that keeps users in constant touch with their colleagues, customers, and suppliers. Increasing productivity and performance while interfacing with the existing systems makes the Nokia 9290 the right tool for business.
	Integrated design
	Wireless office
	Powerful PDA
	E-mail with attachments
	Internet access
	Integrated cellular phone with speakerphone

Forfurther details and specifications please go to the Nokia 9290 web page.