December 20, 2012- Last week, a jury ruled that Apple and LG did not infringe three video codec patents (5,227,878, 4,958,226 and 5,135,377) asserted by Multimedia Patent Trust (MPT).  Apple had been accused of infringing all three of the patents-in-suit and LG was accused of infringing the ’878 and ’377 patents. MPT, a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent, was formed as a patent-holding entity contemporaneously with the merger of AT&T spin out, Lucent, with Alcatel in 2006. MPT originally filed suit in December 2010 against Apple, LG, Canon, and TiVo alleging that a variety of products including LG phones that incorporate Qualcomm chips, Apple computing and mobile devices, TiVo digital video recorders, and Canon video cameras, infringed MPT’s video codec patents. TiVo was dismissed from the suit with prejudice in March 2011 and Canon was dismissed shortly before trial in November,  2012. (The Canon dismissal was based on a determination that Canon’s chip supplier, Fujitsu, was licensed to the patents through a prior agreement with AT&T.) The ‘878 and ‘226 patents were among those asserted by Lucent against Dell, Gateway and Microsoft in in which Lucent originally won a $1.5 billion award against Microsoft in 2007 that was later overturned in 2009. 3:10-cv-02618