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The US Supreme Court has ruled that four early patents on CD technology are
now worthless. Thomson of France had been earning $40 million each year
from the patents, which it began filing in 1972. But in 1996, a jury in Delaware
accepted arguments from a company called Quixote that Universal Pictures had
pre-empted Thomson with a CD-like video disc in 1972. Thomson appealed against
that ruling, but the Supreme Court has now decided that although the Universal
disc had only crudely formed pits in its surface, like those that store music
data in a CD, the concept invalidated Thomson’s claim.