The Supreme Court has turned down Microsoft Corp.'s appeal of a jury verdict that it infringed on another company's patent.

The justices said Monday they will not intervene in Microsoft's legal fight with Alcatel-Lucent. The disputed patent covers a method of entering information into fields on a computer screen without using a keyboard. Alcatel-Lucent says Microsoft's Outlook calendar and other programs illegally used this technology.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit already has ordered the trial court to reconsider the $358 million in damages the jury awarded to Alcatel-Lucent.

Microsoft Corp., the world’s biggest software maker, agreed to pay VirnetX Holding Corp. $200 million and license technology to communicate privately over the Internet, ending a patent dispute.

“We believe that this successful resolution of our litigation with Microsoft will allow us to focus on the upcoming pilot system” for a virtual private network, Chief Executive Officer Kendall Larsen said yesterday in a statement.

VirnetX, which won a $105.8 million jury verdict in its patent-infringement lawsuit in March, was seeking a court order to block Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft from continuing to use the technology in its Windows operating system and Communications Server. The jury award also could have been tripled by the court’s judge.

Microsoft argued at trial that the patents were valued at no more than $15 million. Investors bet the patents were worth more, driving Scotts Valley, California-based VirnetX’s share price up almost 300 percent in the past 12 months. VirnetX had a market value of $267.9 million, based on the May 14 price.

VirnetX had been public in its desire to be bought to resolve the dispute. The agreement in which it obtained the patents from defense contractor SAIC Inc. included a provision that SAIC would get 10 percent of any proceeds if VirnetX were acquired by Microsoft, according to a company regulatory filing.

The patents relate to use of a domain-name service to set up virtual private networks, through which a website owner can interact with a customer in a secure way or an employee can work at home and access a company’s files. The technology stemmed from work performed for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to develop secure communications, VirnetX said.

File-sharing software company LimeWire has lost a long-running court battle to the major recording companies.

A judge with the U.S. District Court in New York ruled this week that the company and its chairman, Mark Gorton, were liable for inducing copyright infringement.

The decision in the case, which began in 2006, doesn't mean the site will shut down right away. The record labels and LimeWire are to meet with Judge Kimba Wood on June 1 to determine the next steps, such as a possible deal to work together going forward and a potential award for damages.

Recording Industry Association of America Chairman Mitch Bainwol said in a statement Wednesday that the ruling was "an extraordinary victory" against one of the largest remaining file-sharing services in the United States.

The RIAA said more than 200 million copies of LimeWire's file-sharing software have been downloaded so far, including 340,000 in the last week alone.

The ruling could pave the way for a deal, similar to the way Napster was sued out of existence in 2000 but was reborn and is now under the ownership of Best Buy Inc. with licensing deals with all the major recording companies.

"This isn't about getting something shut down, it's about getting something licensed and legal," said Steve Marks, general counsel for the RIAA.

Attorneys from top Atlanta law firms announced this week the formation of a new law firm, focused exclusively on intellectual property law. McKeon, Meunier, Carlin & Curfman, LLC launched in Atlanta on Monday, April 19, 2010. The new firm will provide patent prosecution, IP transaction and trademark services along with intellectual property strategy and management services. The firm will focus heavily on the life sciences sector, drawing on the Principals' strong legal and technical backgrounds in biotechnology, chemistry, pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

The four founding principals include Tina McKeon, Ph.D. and Andrew "Drew" Meunier from the Atlanta office of Fish & Richardson, an international IP law firm. Christopher Curfman, Ph.D. joins from Ballard Spahr's Atlanta office and Gregory Carlin joins McKeon Meunier from his role as Intellectual Property Counsel with Edwards Lifesciences, a medical device maker in Southern California. Carlin was previously affiliated with Alston & Bird, an Atlanta-based law firm.

Also joining from Fish & Richardson are Miles Hall, D.V.M., who will be an Associate Attorney; Andrew Baraniak, Ph.D. and Kimberlynn Becnel Davis, Ph.D. join as Patent Agents.

"I am pleased to be stepping into a small firm with such an elite team. We have had a great response so far from clients who seem eager for an alternative to big-firm IP law but who still want and need quality legal work," said Dr. Tina McKeon. "Our new firm gives us the flexibility to be very client-centric. I think our timing, focus, and flexibility offer a welcome change," added Drew Meunier.

McKeon Meunier has leased 8,000 square feet of Class A office space in the Historic Biltmore Hotel in Midtown Atlanta, located at 817 W. Peachtree Street. The firm has also launched a website with more information about the firm and its professional staff at www.m2IPlaw.com.

Digital video recorder maker TiVo Inc and EchoStar Corp return to a Texas court on Tuesday in the latest round of a longstanding fight over a television recording technology patent.

The legal dispute dates back to 2004, when TiVo charged that satellite TV provider EchoStar Communications Corp's Dish network system violated TiVo's patent for "Time Warp" software, which allows users to record one TV program while watching another.

The court ruled in TiVo's favor in 2006, and Dish (DISH.O) and EchoStar Corp last year paid $104 million in damages after the U.S. Supreme Court denied Dish's appeal of the ruling.

Following the ruling, EchoStar continued to distribute its digital video recorders, and collect subscription fees for the DVRs, which had replaced the software with a "work-around" that it claimed did not infringe on TiVo's patented technology.

Arguments are expected to take place Tuesday and Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Texarkana, Texas, before Judge David Folsom. He will consider whether TiVo can prove EchoStar's new DVR software further infringed on TiVo's patent, and therefore owes TiVo more damages.

Analyst Spencer Wang of Credit Suisse said that a ruling in TiVo's favor, which could take months to come, could be rough for Dish, since the work-around software is deployed on the vast majority of its millions of DVRs.

A Rhode Island couple whose son is accused of illegally sharing songs online should not be forced to surrender their home computer for inspection because it would violate their right to privacy, their lawyer argued at a federal court hearing Tuesday.

Joel Tenenbaum, a 25-year-old Boston University graduate student, is accused by the Recording Industry Association of America of downloading at least seven songs and making 816 music files available for distribution on the Kazaa file-sharing network through 2004.

The recording industry's lawsuit against him is part of an aggressive campaign targeting people who share music online. The industry says it has lost more than $3 billion because of peer-to-peer networks that enable Internet users to share large numbers of songs online.

Record company lawyers believe Tenenbaum downloaded the songs on his parents' computer in Providence and urged a federal magistrate on Tuesday for permission to copy the machine's hard drive for proof of copyright infringement.

"The information on the computer is directly relevant and material to the underlying claims in this case," said attorney Daniel Cloherty.

But Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor representing Arthur and Judie Tenenbaum and their son, said the computer contains information protected by attorney-client privilege and holds other sensitive and personal material that has nothing to do with the case.

"You can hardly imagine anything more intrusive than asking anyone to disgorge a computer," said Nesson, who is also challenging in U.S. District Court in Boston the constitutionality of a federal copyright law that the music industry has used to target song-swappers.

Nesson also argued that the computer was not the one on which the alleged downloading took place. Judie Tenenbaum has said in an affidavit that the couple bought the computer after their son had left home, and that he had used it only occasionally to check his e-mail during visits.

A $49 million infringement ruling in favor of 800 Adept against Targus Information Corp. was overturned Aug. 29 by the U.S. Court of Appeals due to faulty claim construction and other trial-court errors.

In 2006, Vienna, Va.-based Targus lost an infringement case filed by Orlando-based 800 Adept for technology used to route calls to 800-numbers that the Orlando company says was patented technology.

The initial verdict included the $49 million award in damages against Targus, in addition to nearly $6 million in attorney fees.

"We always believed that there was never any basis for this lawsuit and that the jury verdict was totally misguided. We refused to settle and had the courage of our convictions to see it through to the appeals court," said George G. Moore, CEO of Targus Information Corp., in a prepared statement.

Orlando law firms Allen, Dyer, Doppelt, Milbrath & Gilchrist and Maher Law Firm co-represented 800 Adept.