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Alcatel-Lucent draws big buckets of blood in continuing legal battles with Microsoft

Microsoft must pay $1.52 billion for infringing on two Alcatel-Lucent patents involving MP3, a San Diego federal jury ruled today. This is the first of six patent lawsuits brought by Paris-based telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent. Microsoft intends to “seek relief from the trial court, and if necessary appeal.”

The lawsuit contends that Microsoft violated Alcatel-Lucent’s patents with its use of MP3 technology used to play music on Windows Media Player. Microsoft’s argument is that it legally licensed MP3 technology from the Fraunhofer Institute for $16 million.

“We think this verdict is completely unsupported by the law or the facts,” said Tom Burt, a Microsoft deputy general counsel. “We believe that we properly licensed MP3 technology from its industry recognized licenser - Fraunhofer. The damages award seems particularly outrageous when you consider we paid Fraunhofer only $16 million to license this technology.”

“We have made strong arguments supporting our view, and we are pleased with the court’s decision,” said an Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman.

This lawsuit stretches back to 2003, when Lucent filed 15 patent claims against Gateway and Dell. Microsoft later agreed to replace those defendants, saying it got involved because the patents were closely tied to its Windows operating system, reports Reuters.

MP3 isn’t the only technology that Alcatel-Lucent is suing Microsoft for patent infringement. In November 2006, Alcatel-Lucent filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for infringement of seven video technology patents, likely because of the Xbox 360.

Earlier this month, we pointed out that a judge had told the RIAA it needed to pay up for the legal fees for a woman it wrongly sued over unauthorized music sharing. Not surprisingly, the RIAA has asked the judge to reconsider, but there’s also something even more interesting in the request. In the filing, the RIAA lawyers dispute the judge’s claim that the RIAA’s suit was frivolous and note that if they had been allowed to present more evidence they would have made it clear that the woman being sued should still be responsible for the activity on the account, even though she had nothing to do with the file sharing. The filing argues that, as a parent, she should have been aware of what her child was doing — and that since the terms of service she agreed to with her ISP placed responsibility on her, then it automatically was her responsibility. On top of that, the filing points out that since she used the same computer, she should have noticed things like the Kazaa icon on the desktop or the annoying popup ads that come with the adware bundled with Kazaa …. (Full Story)