A judge has overturned a jury's $1.52 billion award in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Alcatel-Lucent against Microsoft. Ruling that Microsoft had not violated one of the two patents in question after all, Judge Rudi Brewster threw out the verdict and indicated that the second patent was on shaky ground as well.
The patents in question cover MP3 compression; the underlying technology was codeveloped 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 snapped up by French firm Alcatel last year.
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