Taken from a street.com article from yesterday.
Other tech titans are scrambling to dust off old patents stored in the
bowels of their R&D labs to force competitors to pay licensing fees, or
simply to put a young upstart on the defensive. Foreign companies, says
Allcock, are especially intimidated by the U.S. legal process.
Take Canada's Newbridge Networks (NN:NYSE), which is the
defendant in a multiple patent litigation suit with Lucent. The case has
been going on for almost three years, and the cost has reached nearly $2
million per party, says Coolley, who's representing Newbridge. Next
month, it's scheduled to go to trial. Lucent isn't commenting on the case,
but spokesman Jeff Baum says he's confident his company will win future
licensing fees from Newbridge. Baum declines to say how much Lucent is
seeking from Newbridge. Nor will he say how much the company derives
from licensing revenue each year from intellectual property litigation.
But it looks like Lucent wins either way. It could wrangle fees out of
Newbridge as part of a settlement. Even if it fails to do that, Newbridge
could think twice before entering Lucent's rather large swath of patented
terrain. Due to the case's large costs, "what Lucent has been using as a
twig against us as a weapon has turned into a club," says Coolley. |
