New AT&T Empire winning giant lawsuits to enforce MP3 patents

Former AT&T component Alcatel-Lucent has won a $1.52 BILLION lawsuit againt Microsoft(no small empire themselves) over licensing of MP3 compression technology. This is just one of a number of lawsuits from old AT&T components over rights to digital audio processing that have not been aggressivelyt enforced until now.

The "new" AT&T has one of these audio encoding lawsuits before the Supreme Court, concerning applicabilty of US patent law abroad. If they either win this case or acquire/merge with the now hugely valuble Alcatel-Lucent MP3 monopoly, they will be able to demand ruinous royalties from about 400 companies. In any event, some lawyers predict Alcatel-Lucent will be approaching those firms shortly with demands for cash.

The re-mergers of phone monopolies(and maybe eventually cable as well?) back into the AT%T behemoth should be blocked by anti-trust regulators but so far the Bush regime has permitted these mergers to go unchecked. Now the AT&T comonents are starting to flex their muscle, perhaps in anticipation of this eventual merger.

MP3 patent rights have not been enforced much until now, but suddenly, with AT&T back in play, former AT&T componehnts that developed digital voice/audio technology a generation ago and junked it due to inadequate computers have suddenly developed new interest in collecting money everytime anyone does anything with digital audio technology.

A mad scramble in the computer industry has resulted, with some speculating that open source technology like .ogg could replace MP3 as a result.

This file itself would have been a .ogg if the media players embedded imost computers could handle that format-hopeflly these lawsuits will KILL mp3 rather than collect piles of money. This is contingent, of course, on the basic analog to digital encoding used in audio software having a non-patented, open source option as well.

Otherwise, your computer could end up an AT&T owned moneymaking machine just like that rental phone your grandfather had in 1950! You will pay extra to buy it-and maybe every time you play a CD on it it will appear on your telephone bill.