In 1989, Karlheinz Brandenburg, an audio engineer and mathematician working for a research institute Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, was one of five men named on a German patent for a technology that could encode and play music in digital form.

In that same year, Brandenburg did related technology research with new colleagues at Bell Labs, then a unit of the former AT&T Corp., where he spent about a year before returning to his native soil.

Yesterday, lawyers for the French telecom-equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent won a $1.52 billion award by convincing a federal jury in San Diego that Microsoft Corp. violated Alcatel's patents covering digital music.

Here's the twist: the two patents mentioned above are not the same one. Alcatel-Lucent acquired the latter because it owns the rights to a lot of former Bell Labs intellectual property, while Microsoft -- like Apple Inc. and dozens of other U.S. technology companies -- licenses the former patent from Fraunhofer.

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