The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft has filed a countersuit against Lucent Technologies, following the lawsuit filed by the company against Microsoft for misuse of Lucent's July 13, 1993 patent #5,227,878 titled “Adaptive Coding and Decoding of Frames and Fields of Video”, which specifically deals, for the purposes of this lawsuit, with how the Xbox 360 console decodes MPEG-2 video files.
The last time these two met in court, the judge ruled that the claim filed by Lucent was invalid due to a typographical error in the patent. Lucent later fixed the error, and requested a jury trial to settle the matter.
According to the report, Microsoft has denied the claims made in the lawsuit, stating that Lucent's claims are invalid due to the company not disclosing “prior art”, or existing inventions in the field which the patent was requested, when it initially applied for the patent. Not only that, but Microsoft also claims that Lucent has itself infringed on several patents currently held by Microsoft.
"Microsoft stands behind our intellectual property, our customers and our partners," commented Microsoft's deputy general counsel Tom Burt in an email statement, according to The Wall Street Journal. "Rather than engage in meaningful licensing negotiations, Lucent continues to choose to litigate against Microsoft and our customers."
