Judge Dismisses One Alcatel-Lucent Claim Against Microsoft

After two weeks of almost incessant bad news for Microsoft comes a ray of hope, courtesy of US District Court in San Diego: Judge Rudi Brewster has dismissed a series of patent infringement claims against Microsoft regarding technology Bell Laboratories developed for converting text into speech, in a summary judgment this afternoon.

It is an extremely important decision, especially given the subject matter of the patent: AT&T (Lucent's former parent company) is currently embroiled with Microsoft in US Supreme Court over whether Microsoft had the right to distribute software that uses AT&T's speech synthesis software in foreign copies of Windows Vista.

While that's not a patent infringement case, today's summary judgment against Alcatel-Lucent -- the current holder of patents from AT&T's Bell Labs division, or so we thought -- might actually bolster AT&T's position on whether it has legitimate claim to those technologies.

In any event, no jury trial will take place later this month, as had been scheduled, to debate another Microsoft infringement case. Last week at about this time, another San Diego jury awarded Alcatel-Lucent $1.52 billion for having infringed upon its MP3 patents, in what is still considered the largest award in a patent infringement suit in US history. That particular case sounded a loud warning klaxon for companies granted MP3 patent licenses by Fraunhofer and Thomson, the list of which comprises most everyone who uses MP3 legitimately - or thought they did.

Speaking to reporters this afternoon, Microsoft's deputy general counsel, Tom Burt, lumped all of Alcatel-Lucent's patent claims together - including the MP3 patents - in predicting that eventually none of them may stand up to the test of legitimacy.

"Once there's judicial review of these complex patent cases, these Alcatel-Lucent claims ultimately won't stand up," Reuters quotes Burt as saying.

Neither company has yet had time to release an official statement, though Alcatel-Lucent's attorney did say her company plans to file an appeal.