Roxio mulls Easy litigation

Roxio told us today it hasn't decided if it is to pursue litigation against a one-man Finnish developer for trademark infringement.

Jukka Poikolanien has been selling Easy CD-DA Extractor since 1998, but received a cease and desist letter by FedEx in October.

Poikolanien responded that the software does not perform the same function: Roxio's Creator is a ripper, and Extractor is, as you might suspect, an audio ripper and encoder. He pointed out that a large number of audio products with "Easy" in the name, but hasn't heard back.

Roxio registered its "Easy CD Creator" trademark in the EU in August. The correspondence can be found here at CD-RW.org.

So is no news is good news for the Finnish developer? It's too early to say.

"We're not at the point yet," a Roxio spokesperson told The Registertoday; Roxio's legal department has not made the decision whether to go forward with the case.

Only last week Roxio settled its dispute with Gracenote, after the latter acquired the user-contributed CDDB CD database of song titles and track information, and began to demand license fees for access. Roxio switched its software to point to the free freedb database instead. Gracenote sued Roxio, claiming the latter had violated the DMCA. Roxio then countersued Gracenote.

Gracenote, the company founded by CDDB's original developers, wanted a nominal 6 cent royalty from software authors. The deal was settled with Roxio agreeing to return to use CDDB, although the royalty was not specified. ®