Dell has announced that it has signed an agreement with Universal Music Group to offer either 50 or 100 DRM-free songs bundled with new PCs sold by the vendor.
The price is a nice discount as well with 50 songs costing $25 USD and 100 songs costing only $45 USD in addition to the price of the laptop or desktop PC.
A couple catches however are that the bundles aren’t available on Dell XPS One desktops, Inspiron Mini 9 laptops, or on systems selling with Linux distributions or 64-bit Windows XP or Vista.
All the music will be in MP3 form and DRM-free and can be played back on any portable player. The current library is somewhat small but Dell says it is looking to expand.
Result for: MP3
Alcatel-Lucent has begun court proceedings for its lawsuit against Microsoft, complaining that Microsoft’s Xbox game systems violates one of the company’s 1993 patents “relating to the code for generating video frames.”
The partnership says it plans to demand $1.50 USD for “every alleged misuse of the patent” but it is not clear what is considered a misuse. At worst, the suit could apply to all Xboxs and Xbox 360s ever sold.
Microsoft has so far disputed the claims and also says “that four fifths of the claim applies to video frames in Windows Media Player, which is available as a separate, free download and so wouldn’t generate royalties for Alcatel-Lucent.”
Alcatel-Lucent began its set of lawsuits in 2002 but had them split up and separated by technologies. In 2003, the company won a $1.5 billion USD verdict from MP3 audio patents but the verdict was overturned this year. Earlier this month however, the company won $368 million USD from Microsoft over patents relating to touchscreen technology.
In response to the suits, Microsoft has filed a countersuit accusing Alcatel-Lucent “of violating nine patents relating to interfaces and messages on both computers and fax machines.”
Result for: MP3
Creative has become the second company to settle with consumers over a class action lawsuit started in 2005 that companies are “misrepresenting the number of files and hours of songs that players could hold” and other exaggerated capacity claims. The other company was Seagate.
The plaintiffs argued that Creative’s definition of a gigabyte was incorrect, which in turn led to false advertisement about the capacities of its players. Creative claimed that 1GB was exactly one billion bytes 1,000,000,000B when it is indeed 1,073,741,824B. Using that logic, the plaintiffs claimed that Creative’s gigabytes were seven percent smaller than real gigabytes.
Creative has always claimed it had no intention of misleading consumers and denies that anyone has ever “suffered” from the way drive capacity was stated.
The new settlement has been made public now and anyone who purchased a Creative MP3 player from 2001 to 2004 can file a claim. Newer players all report that “available capacity will be less… reported capacity will vary” and thus are not eligible.
Anyone who files a claim (the last day is August 7th 2008) can either purchase a new 1GB Zen Stone music player at half price, about $18 dollars, or take a 20 percent off coupon for any item in Creative’s online store.
