Muck Fyhrvold

Intellectual Ventures, the patent troll founded Nathan Myhrvold, has won its first patent suit, but it appears to be a Pyrrhic victory, with a small award, and a denial of ongoing royalty payments:

More than four years after it launched its first waves of lawsuits, the world's biggest "patent troll" has won its first victory in a jury trial.

Late Friday, a Delaware jury ordered Symantec to pay $17 million to Intellectual Ventures, the Washington-based "invention marketplace" created by ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, which boasts more than 30,000 patent assets.

In its verdict [PDF], the jury found that Symantec had infringed two US patents, numbered 5,987,610 and 6,073,142. A third patent, 6,460,050, was found to be not infringed.

The complaint [PDF], filed in 2010, accuses Symantec's Brightmail Gateway and Web Gateway of infringing the '142 patent. That patent was filed in 1997 by Utah's Park City Group and essentially describes a system for distributing e-mail according to a set of predetermined "business rules."

The '610 patent originated with Ameritech, later bought by AT&T. The '050 patent was filed in 1999 by two columnists for computer magazine InfoWorld, Brooks Talley and Mark Pace.

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.

"We are pleased the verdict came back for substantially less than the amount that Intellectual Ventures was seeking, and are considering our options to reduce the damages even further," the spokesperson said via e-mail.

In a statement, IV expressed gratitude to the jury for upholding the patents' validity. "We remain committed to defending inventor rights and protecting the interests of our investors and customers," said IV's head of litigation, Melissa Finocchio.

Admittedly, it was Symantec that won, and I really hate their software, I always felt that their Norton AV was worse than the viruses that it was protecting against, but this is clearly a victory, albeit not a complete one, against the patent trolls.

Unfortunately, on appeal, it goes to the Patent Court (the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) who would slap a patent on a rainy day, (in fact that court literally did allow for a patent on a rainy day) and my guess would be that they would not be a friendly venue for Symantec.