HP will pay $141 million to Intergraph to
settle a patent dispute that has been ongoing since 2002. The payment is
expected to be made by January 28, 2005.
Under the terms of the settlement, HP and Intergraph will
now have a patent cross-license agreement that resolves all legal claims
between the two companies.
The cross-license agreement gives Intergraph
a license to use the HP patents covered by specific fields in
Intergraph’s current product categories. HP, in turn, gets a license to
all of Intergraph’s patents for all fields of use.
“We are very pleased to have fully resolved all of our pending OEM
patent litigation with the HP settlement,” Halsey Wise, Intergraph president and CEO,
said in a statement. “We believe that the settlement with HP
is in the best interest of our shareholders, and we are pleased to have
received a license to HP’s extensive patent portfolio for our fields of
business.”
Wise noted that Intergraph’s intellectual property protection
and enforcement efforts have produced approximately $860 million of
pre-tax income since 2002.
Intergraph’s so-called “OEM case” involves Intergraph’s Clipper System
and Processor patents. Its last target was computer maker Gateway, which it
settled with
in May 2004 for $10 million.
At the end of March 2004, Intergraph
settled
its patent disputes with Dell and Intel. Intel paid Intergraph $225
million while Dell signed a comprehensive licensing agreement that
includes Intergraph’s patents.
Back in September 2003, Intergraph settled
with Texas Instruments for a one-time lump sum of $18 million.