Telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to reinstate the $1.52 billion patent verdict against Microsoft over the MP3 digital music standard patent dispute.
In February 2007, a San Diego jury ruled that Microsoft was guilty of infringing on two patents and awarded Alcatel-Lucent $1.52 billion, a record patent damage award. But in August of last year, U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster threw the jury’s verdict out, saying the one patent was not infringed and the other was co-owned by German research institute Fraunhofer Institute, which had licensed the technology to Microsoft.
Scientists from AT&T’s Bell Labs unit, which was spun off as Lucent Technologies in 1996, had been working to develop the MP3 format along with the Fraunhofer Institute since 1989.
Alcatel, which purchased Lucent in 2006, claims that Microsoft’s Windows Media player infringes on the two MP3 patents.
