RBC Capital is a Canadian bank whose research analysts are still on the job, unlike half of Wall Street's. Too bad they're not able to crunch some happier numbers: RBC downgraded Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, Garmin, Symmetricom, DSP Group and Ericsson this morning. Thirty-word version from analyst Mark Sue:

Telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, a French-American company created through acquisition in 2006, announced a loss of $1.73 billion, its biggest quarterly loss yet and its sixth in a row. The architects of the Alcatel-Lucent merger, chairman Serge Tchuruk and CEO Patricia Russo, will each leave the company over the next few months — Tchuruk in October, Russo after her successor is hired. (Photo by AP/Christophe Ena)

• Merrill Lynch has announced it will take another write-down of $5.7 billion and raise an additional $8.5 billion in new common stock. The bank has announced more than $45 billion in write-downs over the past year. [NYT]

It's almost certain to be tied up in appeal for quite some time, but a federal jury awarded Alcatel-Lucent $1.52 billion in damages versus Microsoft for patent infringement on the MP3 music format. Microsoft had paid a German consortium for use of the format years ago, but Alcatel-Lucent contended they were due cash as well, since one of their corporate forerunners (Bell Labs) was also involved in MP3 format development. Whatever happens to Microsoft, this represents a potentially serious headache for anyone else making MP3 players (hardware or software). Apple declined to comment, so perhaps we'll see Steve Jobs's "Thoughts on MP3 Patents" soon.