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2 April 2014Patents

Marvell told to pay Carnegie $1.5 billion

A US judge has ordered chip maker Marvell Technology to pay Carnegie Mellon University $1.5 billion for patent infringement, raising the fine by $400 million.

Judge Nora Barry Fischer fined Marvell $1.17 billion in December but has been dealing with several post-trial motions since. The university had sought $3.5 billion in damages.

In her March 31 ruling, Fischer justified the new fine because Marvell had “deliberately and extensively” copied the university’s patents.

The $1.5 billion award is one of the largest in US patent litigation history.

At the centre of the dispute are two patents, acquired in 2001 and 2002, which help to detect data stored on hard disk drives. Carnegie sued Marvell in 2009 at the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, claiming the company had sold billions of chips using the technology.

The court ruled in Carnegie’s favour four years later, but in January Marvell asked Fischer to slice $620 million from the fine. She rejected this plea.

Carnegie wanted triple damages, which could have been applied because Marvell had wilfully infringed the patents, but the judge has waited until now to decide this point.

In the latest ruling, Fischer said a triple damages award was unwarranted partly because Marvell’s size and financial condition could not sustain such an “unprecedented penalty”. She also criticised the university’s “inexcusable and unreasonable” delays [five years] in prosecuting the case, and rejected a permanent injunction.

Nevertheless, Fischer reeled off several reasons for raising the fine to $1.5 billion. These included Marvell’s failure to investigate the scope of the patents “vis-a-vis its products” before the suit was filed, as well as “its concealment of its activities through its internal policies”.

The judge also told Marvell to pay a continuing royalty of $0.50 for every chip that uses Carnegie’s technology.

The $1.5 billion award falls narrowly short of the $1.67 billion fine that arose from a case between Centocor Ortho Biotech and Abbot Laboratories in 2009. It was the largest ever fine handed down in US patent litigation history, according to Lex Machina, which compiles IP litigation data, although the ruling was later set aside.

There were no statements available on either Marvell’s or Carnegie’s websites, but reports suggested that Marvell is planning to appeal against Fischer’s ruling.

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More on this story

Patents
21 January 2014   Chip maker Marvell Technology has failed to persuade a US judge to reduce the $1.17 billion fine it must pay a university for patent infringement.
Patents
5 August 2015   The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has granted US chip maker Marvell Technology a partial victory by slashing the $1.54 billion in damages it owes Carnegie Mellon University for patent infringement.
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18 February 2016   Marvell Technology Group has agreed to pay $750 million to settle its patent lawsuit with Carnegie Mellon University.