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[FYI] Audiohighway struggles to push music player patent



http://www.theregister.co.uk/990910-000014.html

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Posted 10/09/99 12:13pm by Tony Smith

Audiohighway struggles to push music player patent

Last July online music company Audiohighway.com was granted a patent 
that appears to give it exclusive right to the concept of a portable 
digital music player. This week, the company tried to persuade the 
great and the good of the music industry that they should be talking 
to it about royalties.  

Understandably, the music biz was having none of it. 

Audiohighway.com applied for the controversial patent, number 
5,914,941, back in 1995. It describes the use of a "portable 
information storage/playback apparatus having a data interface" used 
to store and play back downloaded content regardless of the format 
that content is stored in.  

[...]

But now it's payment time. Audiohighway.com has apparently contacted 
over 30 companies, including Diamond Multimedia, creator of the Rio 
PMP300 MP3 player, demanding royalties -- without much success it 
seems, which is why Audiohighway.com CEO Nathan Schulof this week 
attended the Digital Distribution and Music Industry conference to 
state the company's case.  

The trouble is, the patent is highly specific about the kind of 
device it covers.  [...]

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