Microsoft loses appeal, owes Alcatel-Lucent $512M in patent damages
By Nilay Patel 
posted Jun 20th 2008 9:19PM
posted Jun 20th 2008 9:19PM
Sorting out the various Microsoft / Alcatel-Lucent patent infringement cases isn't exactly fun or easy, but here's another Post-It for that chart we know you're keeping at home: US District Judge Marilyn Huff has just upheld an earlier $368M damages ruling against Microsoft, and calculated that MS owes A-L a total of $512M for infringing those video-encoding patents that are obviously still so relevant to the proceedings in these cases. That's not the same as that earlier ruling that A-L hadn't infringed an MS patent, mind you -- and Redmond says it's going to appeal this decision as well, so this giant mess isn't going anywhere soon. Hey, guys? We're betting that working out a cross-licensing agreement would be way cheaper than all these legal fees you're racking up, you know? Just a thought. Okay, keep fighting. We totally care.
Thats ok, they just saved 45 billion on the failed Yahoo takeover. What's a paltry .5 bill.
I totally agree. How much must they be paying Mr Burn's army of laywers to keep fighting this? At some point it must be damn near the cost of paying the fine.
Suck it up MS- you lose that amount of money in your couch each month.
I think Microsoft products lost their appeal many years ago.
All this for some fast-forward and rewind functions in online video streams?
damn...that's totally gonna lower their market cap to $548.3 billion
...only $548.3 billion : ( come one microsoft you have to do better than that.
Sucks for them.
Does Alcatel-Lucent actually make money outside of the courthouse? Didn't they also get money out of Microsoft over the mp3 codec? Can someone enlighten me? I'm having trouble getting the word PATENT-TROLL out of my head.
80,000 employees seems like a lot to be supported by nothing but patent trolling.
well over 50% of all ADSL lines -and variations- in the world come from ALU. The industry's first -and only- 100Gigabit/s per linecard router. 80.000 employees as mentioned... The world's most deployed IPTV video solution... #1 in market share in ATM switches and techology leader in Optical networks....
not to mention a tiny small insignificant thing called "Bell Labs"... out of which things like the transistor were invented..
Just wondering.. maybe they ARE indeed defending the patents... but they were not created out of thin air...
Yet irony has it... ALU is the sole distributor / integrator of Microsoft's Mediaroom IPTV software which uses the patents in question...
My 2 cents..
As a disclaimer... i do work for ALU.
Another ALU employee here. Gotta say it; though it may seem insignificant at first glance, the company is much bigger than most realize. It's not patent-trolling, its a real defense of their own IP. It's also not nearly their only income.
Microsoft has been losing appeal for a while....
Microsoft can afford to fight this as long as there's somewhere to fight it. Maybe they're playing the odds that Alcatel-Lucent will go out of business before they run out of courts.
Microsoft should have just bought out Alcatel-Lucent.
That's not actually a bad Idea. lol
That's pretty true, probably cheaper.
Wont happen, Alcatel - Lucent in 2007 had a US$27.7 billion dollar turn over with a 77,000 staff in 130 countries. People keep thinking Microsoft is a big player but compared to Telecommunications or Energy (Energy = US$520 trillion dollars) it's lunch money.
ALU has a market cap of about 9 billion.
Actually... ALU has a market cap of 13.3 billion - still it is lunchmoney for Microsoft. That's less than Microsoft's annual profit. Could swallow em up without a hiccup.
512MB in patent damages.
big time patent trolling.
I think you failed to calculate the potential cost savings Microsoft could obtain should they succeed in their appeal, Nilay. Granted, as an attorney I'm a little biased on the subject, but I believe that litigating can be doubly beneficial: In the first place, if they succeed their savings are obvious (i.e. no payment). But, even if they fail, there is a chance that either the appellate decision (should one be written) could contain language which will make it more difficult to file a patent infringement claim in the future (admittedly, not likely) AND they also send a message to the many patent trolls out there that they will fight these types of cases. This has the added benefit of potentially warding off future litigation. Many of the corporations I have worked with have followed this logic and have seen a demonstrable decrease in their patent infringement claims.
Meh, this is only a tickle to Microsoft, hardly anything for them to worry about.
The joys of proprietary codecs..
Vorbis+Dirac for the win!
Fuck this! Im concerned about the Viacom Vs Youtube lawsuit.... This doesnt even put a dent on microsoft. They get hit with anti trust fines that are bigger than this all the time. lol It doesnt seem to be stopping them from assimilating everyone into Winborg....
microsoft should buy the company then put it out of business, it would work out better for microsoft
"If you can't beat em, steal from them, if you can't steal from them, buy them, if you can buy them - kill them".
Spoken like a true a Microsoft employee.
didn't Microsoft lose it's appeal a while ago?
har har.
That must be because they were using AI Attorneys who only had 512 MB of RAM, so they couldn't run Vista to get the job done.