Microsoft has been ordered to pay US$70 million to networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent in a years-old patent dispute that at one time could have cost Microsoft $1.5 billion.
A jury in San Diego issued its verdict Friday in a lawsuit that accused Microsoft of violating patents in several products including Outlook. The suit was brought by Lucent in 2003, before it merged with Alcatel.
In 2007, a jury in the same court ordered Microsoft to pay Lucent $1.5 billion for the infringement. The judge overturned that decision, saying Microsoft infringed only one of two patents at issue, and that the second patent was jointly owned by a European research institute, so the court didn't have jurisdiction to rule on it.
