A federal appeals court on Thursday wrestled with whether to overturn or uphold a lower court"s $565 million judgment against Microsoft in the biggest patent dispute in Web history.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit spent 40 minutes asking about procedures that the district judge followed in the Chicago trial, which ended with an August 2003 jury verdict in favor of the University of California. The school and its spinoff company called Eolas share the rights to a patent that they claim covers plug-ins and applets that are invoked through a Web browser.
Judge Randall Rader suggested that the jury should have been permitted to decide whether or not earlier research--that could have changed the outcome of the lawsuit filed against Microsoft--was relevant. "The point is that the district judge didn"t even let this be considered as prior art" by the jury, Rader said. Microsoft was barred from showing the jury information about an early Web browser called Viola created by a computer programmer and artist named Pei Wei and demonstrated to other researchers a year before the university filed for its patent.