Speaking of Microsoft, faithful viewer Matt informs us that the company is in some serious trouble now: according to the Associated Press, a jury has awarded plaintiffs Eolas and the University of California $520 million in damages after determining that Microsoft infringed on their patent when it shipped Internet Explorer. To get a sense of just how much money that is, you're going to have to put it in perspective with amounts you come into contact with every day, so first, picture a half a billion dollars. Got it? Okay, now add another $20 million to the pile. And now you're saying, "Gee, it's so much clearer now-- that's one big heap of cash!"

Keep in mind that this ruling doesn't necessarily mean squat; remember, a court once ordered Microsoft to be cleft in twain, and after the appeals process that somehow got talked down to a pony ride and a free Dove bar. But if Microsoft should lose its appeal (as if it ever had any in the first place-- har de har), then yes, the company will have to fork over slightly more than a half-billion dollars because it never licensed a patent that apparently covers "the embedding of small interactive programs such as 'plug-ins' or 'applets' into World Wide Web documents." We're not going to comment on whether or not we think that patent should be valid in the first place, in part because if we ever publicly agreed with Microsoft on anything, our eyes would explode and we just shampooed the carpets, but it sounds to us like anyone else making browsers that support the QuickTime or Flash plug-ins and/or Java should start running now. (Apple: wanna hide in our basement? It's paneled!)

As for where the $520 million figure came from, apparently the jury decided that $1.47 per unit constituted "reasonable royalties," and Microsoft has reportedly shipped 354 million copies of Windows (IE's nothing but an integrated part of Windows, ya know) from the time the patent was granted in late '98 until the suit was filed in the summer of '01. Hoo-weee. But don't feel too badly for Microsoft, folks; at last count, the company had $49 billion sitting around, up almost 27% from the $38.7 billion it had last year. By our calculations, that means Microsoft can lose roughly twenty of these half-billion-dollar lawsuits a year and still never actually lose any ground. No wonder the company is so brazen about breaking laws and violating patents-- who needs ethics when you've got huge wads of cash?