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A US federal judge yesterday signed off on a $1.53 billion jury verdict against Microsoft.
The damages had already been awarded by a jury in February, but they had to be placed alongside a judgement by US District Court Judge Rudi Brewster, reported The Inquirer.
Microsoft claimed that the patents, owned by Alcatel-Lucent’s, do not govern its MP3 encoding and decoding tools. The firm instead asserts that it licenses the MP3 software used by its Windows Media Player from Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a German company.
A spokesman from Microsoft has said that it would challenge the ruling, following the news that the US Supreme Court ruled in its favour in a similar patent dispute brought against it by AT&T.