The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday denied Microsoft’s appeal of a $290 million patent infringement verdict against it by a tiny Toronto technology firm, i4i, ruling that the standards for challenging the validity of patents are more stringent than the software giant had claimed in its defense.
The main ruling, which was authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, found that the validity of patents should be judged by the more stringent “clear-and-convincing standard.” That puts the responsibility for challenging the validity of a patent squarely on the party aiming to invalidate the intellectual property in question.
“Microsoft tried to gut the value of patents by introducing a lower standard for invalidating patents. It is now 100 percent clear that you can only invalidate a patent based on ‘clear and convincing’ evidence,” Loudon Owen, chairman of i4i, said in a statement.