The stock of Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCSA) closed at $37.81 losing 0.26% in yesterday’s trading session. This company had earlier filed a multiyear patent infringement lawsuit against Sprint Corp (NYSE:S), which led to a Pennsylvania jury awarding it $1.5 million. The company is up again seeking that it be given more in terms of the additional damages. It is expected that on Dec. 5 Comcast Cable Communications LLC will be delivering its preliminary arguments.
Comcast is pushing the court to help it obtain damages for a text messaging patent it bought from Nokia Oyj (ADR) (NYSE:NOK).That was in the original case that was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 2012. The company launched a complaint citing that Sprint Spectrum LP had moved ahead to violate the patent with its use of mobile email and the wireless picture mail.
That patent was issued in 2005 and it applied to both the multimedia messaging systems and text messaging (SMS).Initially, Comcast had been seeking that it be given more than $153 million in damages, based on royalties for multimedia messages and text sent by Sprint customers.
It was in February that a jury came to the conclusion that there was indeed sufficient evidence proving that indeed Sprint had violated the patent. Comcast was awarded $1.5 million in damages. The judgment was based on the original price of the patent before the company bought it from Nokia. The amount was way lower than what Comcast expected to get. Asides from that, it was also below the $7.3 million median payout for patent litigation cases.
Comcast has forwarded a number of arguments. The most glaring one was that it did not trust the way the damages were calculated. It took the strong standpoint that they had indeed been calculated incorrectly. It was against the move to go by cost of the patent in opposition to Sprint’s “rampant years’ long infringing use of patent.
In line with the company’s daily undertakings, one of the top officials working with the provider opined, “As Comcast well knows, cable television and internet customers will not wait indefinitely for resumption of service.”The company will be counting on the court to give it what it needs in order to resolve all the pending matters.