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Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft Corp.

Legal case

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 15, 2026
Entity authorityQ4712950 ↗
Source-derived summary

Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft Corp., also known as Lucent Technologies Inc. v. Gateway Inc., was a long-running patent infringement case between Alcatel-Lucent and Microsoft litigated in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California and appealed multiple times to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Alcatel-Lucent was awarded $1.53 billion in a final verdict in August 2007 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in San Diego. The damages award was reversed on appeal in September 2009, and the case was returned for a separate trial on the amount of damages.

Origin

The dispute between Microsoft and Lucent (and later Alcatel-Lucent) began in 2003 when Lucent Technologies (merged with Alcatel in 2006) filed suit against Gateway and Dell in U.S. District Court, San Diego, California. Lucent claimed in this first San Diego case that Dell and Gateway had violated patents on MP3-related technologies developed by Bell Labs, a division of predecessor company American Telephone & Telegraph. Other patents said to be infringed relate to MPEG video technology, speech technology, internet technology, and other technologies. Microsoft voluntarily joined the lawsuit in April 2003 and Alcatel was added after it acquired Lucent.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft Corp.” as legal case. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2007, 2009, 2003, 2006—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Alcatel-Lucent, Microsoft and Corp can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as legal case. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4712950. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2009, 2003 and 2006.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft Corp.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.