Shazam, Others Sued Over Music Identification Patent

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on May 15, 2009 - 8:19am.

London - Along with Apple (NASD: AAPL) and a host of other companies, Shazam, the U.K.-based developer of a popular music identification application, was sued for patent infringement this week by a company called Tune Hunter, CNET News.com reported.

Tune Hunter has also filed complaints in federal court in Texas against Samsung, Amazon.com, Napster, Motorola, Gracenote, Verizon Wireless, LG, AT&T Mobility and Pantech Wireless.

Tune Hunter's patent, awarded in September 2005, describes "a music identification/purchasing system, specifically to a method for marking the time and the name of the radio station in portable device such as a key holder, watch, cellular phone, beeper or the like which will allow the user to learn via internet or regular telephone the name of the song, artist and/or music company by matching the stored data with broadcast archive."

Shazam's application, which has been a hit on the iPhone and is due to be available on 250 million mobile devices by year's end, allows a user to identify a song by holding the phone up to a speaker, which compares the song playing against a database and returns artist, album and song title information via text message.

http://www.shazam.com