A New Lawsuit Against Microsoft Might Block the Xbox 360 Sales

After a smashing success in the United States and Australia, Microsoft's Xbox 360 console might be forced to remain locked in the Redmond company's storage facilities. The reason? Just your common patent lawsuit filed by Lucent Technologies.

Lucent set this in motion on March 28 at U.S. District Court in San Diego and requested a relief injunction and unspecified damages.

The company, founded in February 1996, is not at its first trial, in 2003, two of Microsoft's hardware partners, Gateway and Dell, being accused of violating three patents.

In Microsoft's case, Lucent alleges that patent 5,227,878, called "Adaptive Coding and Decoding of Frames and Fields of Video", was violated. The technology protected by this patent enables the content to decode MPEG-2 files.

PCWorld, quoting a partner with law firm McDermott Will & Emery, notes that Lucent may have a stronger case for an injunction to block the sale of Xbox 360s than NTP did to shut down. The reason invoked by PCWorld is that Lucent makes and sells technology, while NTP only owns the patent.

Another lawsuit Microsoft recently lost, this time related to Internet Explorer 6, has forced the Redmond company to change the way certain ActiveX components are loaded, thus triggering a new wave of updates and issues.