Last week a jury ordered Microsoft to pay €234 million (US$367.4 million) to Alcatel-Lucent for infringing on two patents.Microsoft says it will appeal, according to an Associated Press report said. The jury at US District Court in San Diego found that handwriting recognition technology in Microsoft's Tablet PC operating system infringed on pattern recognition patents held by Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent.
The jury also decided that some of Microsoft's programs, including the Outlook email application and the Windows Mobile operating system, infringed on an Alcatel-Lucent patent in the way users select calendar dates from a menu, the report said. Microsoft was found not to have infringed on a video decoding patent related to the way the Windows operating system plays DVDs.
'We do not believe the jury's verdict against Microsoft on the two user interface patents is supported by the facts or the law,' said Tom Burt, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft, in a statement. 'We will move immediately to have the two verdicts against Microsoft overturned.'
Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman Mary Lou Ambrus was quoted by the report as saying that the company was disappointed by the video patent decision.
The case decided Friday was just one of many stemming from 15 patent claims made in 2003 by Lucent Technologies against PC makers Gateway and Dell for technology developed by Bell Labs, Lucent's research arm.