Yesterday, a federal jury ordered that Microsoft has to pay up $1.5 billion in damages to telcom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent SA for violating two patents related to digital music, according to the Associated Press.

Microsoft says the verdict, concerning MP3 encoding and decoding via Windows Media Player, is "unsupported by the law or the facts."

The finding is part of a larger suite of suits that also involve speech coding and the video coding used in the Xbox 360. I wonder if this could this have an impact on Microsoft's push to roll out IPTV and their current video on demand download service? Brian Crecente

Jury finds against Microsoft in $1.5B patent dispute with Alcatel-Lucent [AP]

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