Legal News

Tech companies looking to courts for relief from patent case damages

By Richard Binder

Oracle, Apple Inc., Yahoo, Intel Corp. and several others are throwing their weight behind Microsoft Corp. as it tries to persuade the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to overturn a $500 million jury verdict for infringing on a Lucent patent. That case was decided in 2007 in a Southern District of California federal court before Judge Rudi Brewster. In friend of the court briefs filed this month, the tech companies are urging the court to rein in the "entire market value rule." The rule allows the calculation of damages based on the whole product, even if just one feature is infringed.

Microsoft got hit with $500 million in damages because the act of creating a new appointment in the calendar function of the company's e-mail product, Outlook, infringed on a Lucent patent. The damages were calculated by taking a percentage of Outlook sales, and to a lesser degree, the sales of other Microsoft products with similar functions.

"We think that [the entire market value rule] is one of the doctrinal rules that has been misapplied, and it's an important target for us because it's a rule that often justifies excessive damages," said Robert Merges, a University of California at Berkeley School of Law professor who helped pen an amicus curiae brief for Yahoo, Intel and others. "It's been applied fairly loosely."

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Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on December 30, 2008 (boomark / email).