Alcatel-Lucent Victory in MP3 Dispute Signals Trouble for Digital Audio
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In the first of a series of patent disputes regarding its claims to rights to technologies used in MP3 audio codecs, French telecommunications firm Alcatel-Lucent -- which now owns the IP first conceived by Bell Laboratories -- was awarded $1.5 billion in a jury verdict against Microsoft in a federal district court in Seattle this afternoon.
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(InfoWorld) - Lucent Technologies has averted a potentially embarrassing delay of its shareholder vote on a merger with Alcatel,Â settling two suits by shareholdersÂ who said the deal doesn't maximize shareholder value. Lucent and AlcatelÂ agreed in April to mergeÂ into a global communications vendor that would have about $25 billion in annual revenue. Both companies plan to hold shareholder votes to approve the deal on Thursday. Plaintiffs in Resnick vs. Lucent Technologies Inc. wanted to postpone Lucent's vote, and the company was due at a hearing Wednesday in the Superior Court of New Jersey in Union County to fight that move. Another group of shareholders pursuing a similar suit, Asa R. Maley Trust vs. Lucent, also would have joined the hearing. Now Lucent won't have to face the danger of a legal entanglement the day before its planned vote. Both suits were intended as class actions on behalf of owners of Lucent stock. Terms of the settlement Lucent reached with them will be disclosed later, the company said in a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The Lucent-Alcatel deal would be one of the biggest shifts yet in the consolidation of both service providers and vendors in the telecommunications industry. Both the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission have approved the plan, but it still faces opposition from some investment firms and needs the blessing of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. Lucent is based in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The merged company, to be called Alcatel Lucent, would have its headquarters in Alcatel's base of Paris. Â ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Recently I've been working with the transport synchronization capabilities of the JACK audio server. This article is a report on those capabilities as tested with a variety of Linux audio applications under the JAD and 64 Studio distributions. JACK: The 1-minute Profile read more
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With digital rights management provisions being stripped from MP3 files now by all four leading music publishers, some of the digital music industry's leaders took time at CES today to evaluate the extent to which that loss could lead to gains.
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Reported comments from Sony exec raise doubts about launch of games handheld, which will include MP3 support.
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The MP3 design modification is a major move for Sony, which has been criticized for a product that only allows its own format to be played.
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Memory card and MP3 music player  producer SanDisk  said on Thursday a legal battle with  MP3 patent holders is ongoing and shrugged off a statement from  a patent pool firm claiming a judicial victory.
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A judge in a San Diego court late Thursday dismissed one of several patent claims Alcatel-LucentÂ has made against Microsoft in several high-profile cases against the vendor, but that does not mean the software company is out of the woods yet.
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NEW YORK - Now that digital music players have evolved beyond the ability to store 20 gigabytes worth of music, storage capacity memory is no longer the only factor to consider before buying.
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SanDisk MP3 players are seized from a German electronics show amid a growing legal battle over licensing.
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Sony&#39;s apparently gotten the message: Some of its new MP3 player models will feature direct support for MP3 in addition to its proprietary ATRAC format.
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Lucent Technologies has averted a potentially embarrassing delay of its shareholder vote on a merger with Alcatel,Â settling two suits by shareholdersÂ who said the deal doesn't maximize shareholder value.
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Telecommunication equipment titan Alcatel-Lucent sees global economic woes causing it uncertainty in 2008 after the newly merged company survived a choppy 2007, reporting a fourth-quarter loss Friday and scrapping its dividend for last year.
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A defect in Siemens 65 series mobile phones could lead to failures in audio transmission, the company warned. Because of the software defect, when a phone call is cut off due to a low battery, the disconnection
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InfoWorld - A judge in a San Diego court late Thursday dismissed one of several patent claims Alcatel-Lucent&#160;has made against Microsoft in several high-profile cases against the vendor, but that does not mean the software company is out of the woods yet.
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During the construction of my 64-bit box I collected enough spare parts to build another machine, one destined for a 32-bit Linux system. Last week I finally got that machine built and running with a sparkling new version of the Jacklab Audio Distribution (JAD). I've been using JAD in its alpha releases, but the new box is running the first beta version. Various improvements have been made in JAD since my earlier review, including the adoption of a 2.6.19 kernel optimized for superb realtime performance. Since I've profiled the system in an earlier blog entry I decided to briefly review some of the more unusual software included with the distribution or built with the help of its development packages. JAD contains more than 70 applications for audio and video composition and production, most of which are at their most recent release versions, so come join me in a look at some less typical sound &amp; music software running on one of the best of the new breed of multimedia-optimized Linux distributions.
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Alcatel-Lucent reported higher sales but a net loss for the fourth quarter due to a big writedown in its CDMA (code division multiple access) and IP (Internet protocol) multimedia services businesses.The company said revenue rose 18 percent to &#8364;5.2 billion on the back of strong performance at several of its major business units. But despite the stronger sales the company saw its net profit plunge into the red to the tune of &#8364;2.6 billion. This was largely due to the &#8364;2.5 billion writedown.Its wireline and wireless carrier business was strong and revenues were &#8364;3.7 billion in the quarter against &#8364;3.2 billion during the same period a year earlier. The company benefited from strong growth in carrier-type optical networking, and the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and WCDMA (Wideband CDMA) sectors. Broadband access revenue fell on the back of a decline in the number of DSL lines delivered.Revenues were up 27 percent in the services business to &#8364;1 billion after the company won large network operations contracts and worked on IPTV and IP network integration projects. Its enterprise business segment saw revenues of &#8364;435 million, up about 4 percent, thanks to strong momentum in Europe and Asia.The report came with bad news for investors. The company suspended its dividend payment for 2007 &quot;in the light of these results and or a more uncertain market outlook,&quot; it said.&quot;We just thought very plainly that it was good financial discipline looking at both our net income in &#39;07 and the very tough macroeconomic environment,&quot; said Hubert de Pesquidoux, chief financial officer, on a conference call.CEO Patricia Russo warned that the company doesn&#39;t have a positive short-term outlook, particularly with a looming recession in the U.S. given Alcatel-Lucent&#39;s dependance on business there.&quot;There is a level of uncertainty ... that leaves a lot unknown,&quot; Russo said.Despite interest in IP networking and 3G broadband services, growth over the next year is likely to be flat or just slightly up, Russo said. Taking into account currency differences, the market will likely be down, she said.Some customers are also pursuing network-sharing arrangements, which could affect how much those companies spend on their own infrastructure, she said.Russo defended the&#160;2006 merger of Alcatel and Lucent&#160;and said the company is still trying to reduce costs. So far, about 6,700 employees have been let go in&#160;a restructuring plan&#160;that will shed a total of 12,500 employees, she said.