Microsoft in BlueJ patent U-turn
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We didn't mean to do it Microsoft has pulled a patent application for "Object Test Bench" in Visual Studio after it was accused both of copying the idea from the BlueJ community, and of filing the patent application in the full knowledge that prior art existed.â¦
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Microsoft might be forced to stop selling its top software products in South Korea as a result of a patent-infringement ruling made over the weekend against the company.
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A US jury found that Microsoft infringed audio patents held by the world's biggest software maker Alcatel-Lucent.   Microsoft has been ordered to pay Pounds 778m in damages, however the firm says it may appeal the ruling.   It says the verdict is unsupported by the law or the facts.
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com December 8, 2004, 11:09 AM PT. Microsoft and the University of California are getting ready to make their respective cases before the US Court of Appeals on Thursday in the biggest patent fight in Web history.
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I bought the domain name HeyMicrosoftSueMe.org at the suggestion of Marcel Gagne after posting a blog entry on the topic.  The idea was to ask Linux users to join me in calling Microsoft's bluff.  Let's get the patent infringement claims tried in court and get this over with. Several people talked me out of it.  Fortunately, a lawyer named Christian Einfeldt had the same idea and followed through. Here's a copy of Marcel's entry on the topic from his own blog, with a link to the "Sue me first Microsoft list" in case you want to add your own name. Christof, if you're reading this, you're welcome to the domain name HeyMicrosoftSueMe.org.
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Microsoft&#39;s aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than &quot;a marketing thing,&quot; according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.&quot;They have been sued for patents by other people, but I don&#39;t think they&#39;ve -- not that I&#39;ve gone through any huge amount of law cases -- but I don&#39;t think they&#39;ve generally used patents as a weapon,&quot; Torvalds said. &quot;But they&#39;re perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the marketplace, and patents is just one thing where they say, &#39;Hey, isn&#39;t this convenient? We can use this as a PR force.&#39;&quot;Torvalds made the comments during the second half of an interview conducted by the Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin on Oct. 16. The foundation is expected to make the rest of the interview publicly available on its Web site Monday. The foundation released the initial portion of the interview in January.&quot;Another reason why I don&#39;t think Microsoft really seriously would go after patents is when you&#39;re a convicted monopolist in the marketplace you really should not be suing your competitors over patents,&quot; Torvalds continued. &quot;I think that most Microsoft lawyers would say, &#39;You know, let&#39;s not do that; that sounds insane&#39;.&quot;Microsoft&#39;s recent work around improving its platform&#39;s interoperability with Linux left Torvalds largely unmoved.&quot;I think there are people inside Microsoft who really want to improve interoperability and I also think there are people inside Microsoft who would much rather just try to stab their competition in the back,&quot; he said. &quot;I think the latter class of people have usually been the one[s] who won out in the end, but -- so I wouldn&#39;t exactly trust them.&quot;Microsoft spokespeople on Friday declined to comment on Torvalds&#39; remarks. The company has said it believes that Linux infringes on its intellectual property, although it has been criticized for not being more precise with its allegations.Torvalds is instead focused on improving Linux, he said. &quot;I work weekdays, I work weekends, I work 52 weeks a year. I don&#39;t want there to be any question of who&#39;s the best maintainer,&quot; he said. &quot;And at the same time, I actually also do want to encourage competition. ... So, I actually enjoy seeing all these other kernel trees happening. All the vendors have their own.&quot;However, the Linux kernel community overall could be more welcoming to new ideas, he suggested. &quot;One of the problems is we have people who have such high criteria for what is acceptable or not that it scares away people who want to do new code and do new experiments,&quot; he said. &quot;We mustn&#39;t set the bar that high. New code, new drivers, there will be problems and I&#39;d rather take them and then improve them.&quot;Even as Linux matures as a technology, it has yet to make a major impact in the mainstream desktop market. &quot;It&#39;s really hard to enter the desktop market because people are used to whatever they used before, mostly Windows ... There&#39;s just this huge inertia in that market,&quot; he said.In contrast, he said, it was much easier to sell Linux in the context of a server: &quot;There&#39;s just a few loads, they&#39;re fairly simple, they&#39;re fairly well-understood, people have much less inertia in upgrading a server than they have in upgrading their desktop.&quot;At one point, the discussion turned to Sun&#39;s work to create an open-source community around Open Solaris. Torvalds expressed deep skepticism toward the effort.&quot;It&#39;s generally hard to build a community around a commercial entity that also wants to be in control because everybody else around that commercial entity will always feel like they&#39;re at the mercy of Sun,&quot; he said.This dynamic is reflected in Open Office, &quot;where the fact that Sun wants to have copyright assignments and exclusive control over the license ends up being something that actually drives away some developers,&quot; he argued.Overall, Torvalds expressed ambivalence toward Sun, which recently has developed an image as a particularly open-source-friendly company. &quot;In many ways, Sun has done a lot of things right. At the same time, they seem to often have trouble going the full last step,&quot; he said.Ian Murdoch, vice president of Sun&#39;s Connected Developer group, defended Sun&#39;s commitment to the open-source model. &quot;An open-source project has to have coordination, it&#39;s not anarchy,&quot; said Murdoch, who earlier in his career founded the Debian version of Linux.&quot;If you look at the Linux kernel itself, Linus is firmly in control of that, and the only difference is he&#39;s an individual and Sun is a company. ... Some of the most successful open-source projects are being driven by companies, like MySQL for example,&quot; he said.Torvalds also pulled out his crystal ball, offering predictions on how technology will change in the next five years.While hardware will be &quot;hugely better,&quot; software&#39;s power and complexity will grow alongside it, he said. &quot;I suspect things will be about the same speed because the software will have grown and you&#39;ll have more &#39;bling&#39; to just slow the hardware down.&quot;Virtualization is &quot;not that big of a deal,&quot; according to Torvalds. &quot;It&#39;s been all around for decades and it&#39;s very interesting in niche markets -- I think the people who expected to change things radically are just fooling themselves.&quot;Real change will come from entirely new uses of computers, he predicted.(James Niccolai in San Francisco contributed to this report.)
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A federal judge has set a December date for a patent suit challenging &quot;AutoPlay&quot; technology included in recent versions of Microsoft Windows.
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Microsoft is not the realÂ patent threatÂ Linux and open source developers should be worried about, said Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. In fact, the software giant will itself be fighting against the software patents system within a few years, Shuttleworth predicted.
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(InfoWorld) - Computer peripheral maker Belkin said Friday it has settled a patent infringement complaintÂ brought against it by software giant Microsoft. "We are glad to have reached a settlement and we are satisfied with the outcome," said Belkin spokeswoman Melody Chalaban, who declined to provide details of the settlement terms. On Aug. 1,Â Microsoft filed a patent-infringement complaintÂ with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) that said Belkin was importing products that infringed on a Microsoft patent for peripheral device technology. According to Microsoft, Belkin uses a technology called "U2" in several of its mouse products. Microsoft's patented U2 technology enables a peripheral to automatically sense whether the device is being plugged into a PS2 or USB (Universal Serial Bus) port on a computer and then make the connection. Microsoft filed the complaint after failing to reach agreement in licensing discussions with Belkin over more than two years, said Tom Burt, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for Microsoft, in an e-mail statement when the ITC complaint was filed. Microsoft said it filed the complaint with the ITC rather than in a U.S. court because it wanted to prevent Belkin from bringing infringing products into the U.S. in the first place. Although Belkin is a U.S. company, the products in question are manufactured outside the country, Microsoft said.
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Microsoft Corp. is fighting a rejection by US patent authorities of a patent for its FAT (file allocation table) file system, the company said Thursday.
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An appeals court should throw out a $500m (Â£260m) patent infringement judgement against Microsoft because a lower court failed to recognise that the patent was not invented by the company awarded the money, a Microsoft lawyer claimed yesterday.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft inked another cross-licensing patent agreement Wednesday, this time with South Korea&#39;s LG Electronics, covering the company&#39;s Linux-based embedded devices.
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In a heavy blow to Microsoft&#39;s intellectual property rights, the US Patent and Trademark Office has initially rejected Microsoft&#39;s patent claims on the universally popular FAT (file allocation table) file system.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft won a round in its battle with patent licensing company Timeline. On May 29, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington dismissed Timeline's accusations of patent infringement, ruling that Microsoft's patent licensing agreement with Timeline is valid. The case dates back to 2005 when Timeline sued ProClarity for patent infringement. A few months later, Microsoft acquired ProClarity, and shortly after that, Timeline added Microsoft to the ProClarity suit. In the suit, Timeline claimed to have terminated its contract with Microsoft based on breach of contract and charged the software giant with patent infringement. In the May 29 ruling, the judge decided that Timeline couldn't terminate the licensing agreement based on its breach of contract claims. As a result, the court ruled that the licensing agreement was valid and thus Microsoft wasn't infringing on any patents. Since the ruling, Timeline filed a breach of contract suit against Microsoft in Washington State Superior Court, it said in a June 4 press release. It also may appeal the district court ruling. Microsoft lost an earlier separate battle against Timeline. In 2002, an appeals court ruled that Microsoft couldn't allow its customers to combine their own code with Microsoft products if the added code resulted in a process that infringed Timeline's patent. The Timeline patents relate to technology used in database software, and Microsoft used them in its Small Business Financial Manager product. Timeline recently changed its focus from a developer of software applications to a company dedicated to licensing its intellectual property. Timeline did not return calls seeking comment. Microsoft also has not replied to requests for comment.
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Comments made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last Thursday to an analyst conference for the most part went unnoticed until stories this morning cited excerpts from a freshly published transcript of that conference. In one such story, an excerpted partial sentence was interpreted as part of a statement that Microsoft may yet exercise its option to sue manufacturers of Linux operating systems other than Novell for infringement of patent.
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Sectors of the Internet world are still buzzing over the release of a Microsoft patent application that appears to claim rights to the underlying method proposed by companies to better determine
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Microsoft, backed by the US government and heavyweight corporations, took its patent battle with telecommunications giant AT and T to the Supreme Court Wednesday, in a case that has wide implications for US firms doing business abroad.