French telecom Alcatel-Lucent has lost a patent case against Apple and LG that it hoped might bring a much-needed cash infusion. In a trial that began November 27, lawyers representing Multimedia Patent Trust (MPT), a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent, had asked a San Diego jury to award their client $172 million in patent royalties from Apple and another $9.1 million from LG, according to a Bloomberg report on the trial.

Apple's win against Alcatel-Lucent and MPT came on the same day that a Delaware jury dealt the Cupertino company a significant loss, finding that iPhones did infringe three patents owned by a holding company, which in turn is partly owned by Sony and Nokia.

MPT claimed its patents were infringed by a wide array of products, including Apple's iPhones, iPods, iPads, and MacBooks, as well as LG products like the Chocolate Touch VX8575, Bliss UX700, and Lotus Elite LX610.

Alcatel-Lucent has been struggling financially for some time now, and has been on the patent warpath for several years. A brief history: Lucent Technologies was created in 1998 when AT&T spun off its famous Bell Labs, along with other assets. In 2006, Lucent sued Microsoft for patent infringement; shortly after filing that suit, it merged with French telecom Alcatel, which carried on the litigation.

The lawsuit against Microsoft turned into a battle royale over audio and video encoding technologies. In 2007, Alcatel-Lucent won a $1.5 billion verdict against Microsoft; it was the largest patent verdict ever, but it was overturned post-trial. The two companies also sparred over video compression technology, including MPEG-2 and some types of MPEG-4 encoding; all the litigation was settled confidentially a few years ago.

Alcatel-Lucent's slew of patent lawsuits is a sad ending to the storied legacy of Bell Labs. In a better world, this newest setback would cause the company to reconsider its ways; but that seems unlikely.

The original lawsuit, filed in 2010 [PDF] also included Canon and TiVo as defendants. TiVo settled the case in 2011. Canon won its case on summary judgment last month.