Intellectual property firm Vringo Inc. (NYSEMKT: VRNG) announced this morning that a wholly owned subsidiary, I/P Engine, had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) alleging that the software giant had infringed on two Vringo patents. The suit seeks compensatory damages “past and future, amounting to no less than reasonable royalties.”
Last November Vringo settled a similar suit against Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL), IAC/InteractiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI), Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT), and Gannett Co. Inc. (NYSE: GCI) for $30 million. Vringo had sought $500 million.
The patents involved in the suit against Microsoft is the same as the patents involved in the Google lawsuit, and are related to relevance filtering when displaying search results. The patents were issued to Lycos, an early web search engine, and were acquired by I/P Engine before it merged with Vringo last year.
Google paid nearly $16 million to Vringo in the November settlement, and that’s probably a figure Microsoft will try to negotiate down.
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