Licensing and patent issues 4

On February 16, 2007, Texas MP3 Technologies sued Apple, Samsung Electronics and Sandisk with a patent-infringement lawsuit regarding portable MP3 players. The suit was filed in Marshall, Texas; this is a common location for patent infringement suits due to speedy trials. Texas MP3 Technologies claimed infringement with U.S. patent 7,065,417, awarded in June 2006 to multimedia chip-maker SigmaTel, covering "an MPEG portable sound reproducing system and a method for reproducing sound data compressed using the MPEG method."
Alcatel-Lucent also claims ownership of several patents relating to MP3 encoding and compression, inherited from AT&T-Bell Labs. In November 2006, (prior to the companies' merger) Alcatel filed a lawsuit against Microsoft (see Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft), alleging infringement of seven of its patents. On February 23, 2007 a San Diego court upheld the suit, and awarded Alcatel-Lucent a record-breaking US$1.52 billion in damages. Microsoft has said it will appeal the verdict, maintaining that the federal jury's decision is "unsupported by the law or facts", since Microsoft had already paid US$16 million to license the technology from Fraunhofer IIS, which, it claims, is "the industry-recognized rightful licensor". A week later on March 2, U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster ruled from the bench in a related suit and dismissed all of Alcatel-Lucent's patents claims relating to speech recognition. Alcatel-Lucent plans to appeal the ruling.
In short, with Thomson, Fraunhofer IIS, Sisvel (and its U.S. subsidiary Audio MPEG), Texas MP3 Technologies, and Alcatel-Lucent all claiming legal control of relevant MP3 patents related to decoders, the legal status of MP3 remains unclear in countries where those patents are valid.
Reference : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3