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Judge overturned a $1.52 billion award for Microsoft in MP3 case |
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Written by Felix Da Silva (fdasilva@bitnip.com)
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Tuesday, 07 August 2007 |
 A judge has overturned a $1.52
billion award in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Alcatel-Lucent on MP3 related patents.
He ruled that Microsoft had not violated one of the two patents and Judge Rudi Brewster threw out the verdict. He also noted that the second
patent was on shaky ground.
The patents concern the underlying MP3 compression technology. It was
co-developed by Bell Labs and German firm Fraunhofer in the 1990s. Bell Labs
became Lucent Technologies in 1995 after a spin-off from parent AT&T and was
acquired by French firm Alcatel last year.
Microsoft says that it licensed the technology from Fraunhofer for $16
million so that it could support MP3 playback natively in Windows. Alcatel-Lucent argued that a license from Fraunhofer was insufficient and that
Microsoft had been infringing on its patents for years.
Reuters says
that Judge Brewster is likely to order that the case be retried to determine the
ownership of the second patent. If Alcatel-Lucent is indeed the proper owner of
the second patent, the damage award will have to be recalculated to reflect the
finding that Microsoft only infringed on one of the patents.
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