Court Approves Jury Award Against Microsoft

A federal judge signed off on a $1.53 billion jury verdict in favor of AlcatelLucent in a digital music patent dispute against Microsoft.Judge Rudi M. Brewster of Federal District Court in San Diego concluded that Microsoft’s Windows Media Player software infringed on patents owned by Lucent Technologies, an American telecommunications equipment maker acquired last year by Alcatel of France.

The damages were awarded by a jury in February.

A Microsoft spokesman, Guy Esnouf, said the company would challenge the ruling during a June 20 hearing, citing a Supreme Court ruling earlier this week in favor of Microsoft in a patent lawsuit brought by AT&T. The company claimed computers running the Windows operating system infringed on AT&T technology for a digital speech coder system.

The high court found that patent law did not apply to software sent to foreign countries.

It also rejected AT&T’s contention that it was entitled to damages for every Windows-based computer manufactured outside the United States using the speech technology.

Mary Lou Ambrus, a spokeswoman for Alcatel-Lucent, said the company was pleased with Brewster’s ruling on its case.

“Alcatel-Lucent views its intellectual property as a vital asset and will continue to preserve and defend these assets,” she said.

In 2003, Lucent filed 15 patent claims against Gateway and Dell for technology developed by Bell Labs, its research arm.

In April 2003, Microsoft added itself to the list of defendants, saying the patents were closely tied to its Windows operating system.

A judge threw out two of the 2003 patent claims and scheduled six separate trials to consider the remaining disputes. The PC makers are still defendants.

In the latest trial, Microsoft disputed that Alcatel-Lucent’s patents govern its MP3 encoding and decoding tools, and said it licensed the MP3 software used by its Windows Media Player from Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a German company.

A lawsuit over two patents for computer user-interface technology brought by Lucent against Microsoft, Dell and Gateway, is due to go to trial May 21, Ambrus said.

Shares of Microsoft rose 42 cents to $30.61 on Wednesday. Alcatel-Lucent’s stock added 7 cents to $13.37.

Source: The New York Times

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