> While jurors sided with Intellectual Ventures, they awarded the patent holder less than six percent of the $299 million its lawyers sought, according to a Symantec spokesperson. The verdict form indicates the company was also asking for ongoing royalty payments, which the jury rejected.
I'm having trouble reconciling $299 million with these patents, which appear to be gigantically obvious. The second patent, US6073142 A, appears to basically be a description of procmail circa 1990. I challenge anyone to figure out where the $299+ million idea was.
It's all nonsensical, so try not to stress yourself too hard trying to make sense of it.
This is much like prosecutors filing 68 charges against someone that committed a single crime. They pick the number from the most absurd form of math, which sets the bar high. If they had asked for $15m, the might have gotten only 6% of that, so they start as high as they can, assuming a reduced valuation, because they know the patent is flimsy at best.
The problem is that they got anything at all, which lends validity to absurdly obvious patents with decades of prior art.
This kind of mathematics is always pie-in-the-sky, but it's generally based on some function of the sales of the infringing product. So a patent may cover a single narrow feature worth only a fraction of a single sale, but if there were a billion copies sold, those fractions add up. How you derive these numbers belongs to the lofty realm of experts charging thousands of dollars by the hour.
I'm having trouble reconciling $299 million with these patents, which appear to be gigantically obvious. The second patent, US6073142 A, appears to basically be a description of procmail circa 1990. I challenge anyone to figure out where the $299+ million idea was.