Microsoft tries to offset $512 million patent judgment
BetaNews | at | by Mike
It's way too early to declare the battle between Microsoft and arch-rival Alcatel-Lucent over. Last week, a judge upheld a big jury decision against Microsoft and tacked on some interest. That just made the defendant a little angrier.
As court documents made public today indicate, Microsoft may be hoping it can pay off this latest judgment with a counter-claim it hopes will make everything a wash: a claim on a patent for a protocol used to send multimedia content over the Internet to mobile clients. For years, companies have been endeavoring to implement a standard engineered through the auspices of the IETF, for an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) that uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) -- which is also one of the key communications protocols used in VoIP. This way, services can meter for multimedia transfers and charge customers for quality of service deployed, rather than bytes downloaded.