It is one thing when a patent trolling company sets sights on humongous awards as a business model. It is another thing entirely when an established company decides to abandon reason, and use patents as a way of boosting profits.

Back in 2007, a judge threw out a jury’s decision on a patent award of $1.52 billion to Alcatel-Lucent in the case Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft.

It was a sad affair, pitting that formerly venerable company, Lucent Technologies – which since merged with Alcatel to form Alcatel-Lucent – and Microsoft.

Unfortunately, the jury in the case decided to seemingly abdicate their sworn duty, forget the facts, and look only at the deep pockets of Microsoft, rendering a decision that should have elicited a collective groan of pain from the plaintiff’s counsels.

That flight of fancy was swiftly terminated when the judge threw out the case, a development I touched on in my blog post, A billion dollars gone bye-bye, back in August of 2007.

Undaunted, and with visions of $$$ permeating their consciousness, the Sergei & Patty Show decided to appeal the verdict…instead of using it as a cudgel to roll Microsoft for a few hundred millions in a settlement.

A year ago, in September 2008, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in Washington, D.C., confirmed what I had called earlier: invalidating the $1.52 billion judgment.

On Friday, the same Appeals Court threw out the last part of the monetary award, $358 million in royalties.

While affirming that Microsoft did violate Alcatel-Lucent’s IP, it found the damages excessive, stating that the infringed-upon patent was but a miniscule part of a shipping product. In the process rejecting Alcatel-Lucent’s position that it be awarded damages equal to the royalty rate that was being negotiated before it (Alcatel-Lucent) brought the lawsuit against Microsoft.

Schadenfreude

Maybe, just maybe, Alcatel-Lucent should have taken the $358 million back in the day, before embarking on this flight of fancy lawsuit?

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Previous/Related

• A Billion Dollars gone bye bye
• US Court of Appeals: What $1.52 billion, Alcatel-Lucent?