A federal jury ruled that Microsoft should pay tiny Eolas Technologies and the University of California $521 million for infringing on their patent for sending software applications over the Internet. But Microsoft, as is its habit, insists that the jury verdict is not the end of the story but the beginning, that it did nothing wrong and even if it did that the remedy is out of whack with the wrong. This is what Microsoft often says after losing a trial and before the inevitable appeals.

The lawsuit was filed in 1999 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois by Michael Doyle, founder of Eolas Technologies in Chicago, who patented technology in 1994 when he was at UC San Francisco that allowed Web-page developers to embed interactive programs in Web pages. His company later licensed the product from the university so it could exploit it commercially, but it never did. Eolas' lawyers say it approached Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) in 1994 along with a number of other companies regarding the technology, but that "they cannot speculate as to why Microsoft never pursued licensing opportunities then."