Patent Office reopens Microsoft-Eolas case
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(InfoWorld) - Just when it seemed certain Microsoft had lost its now 8-year-old patent dispute with Eolas Technologies, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has reopened the case, giving Microsoft a chance to prove that Eolas' patent for browser plug-ins should not be valid. Microsoft confirmed Friday that the USPTO will consider the company's argument that it was the first to invent the technology the Eolas patent covers, declaring "interference" in the case and scheduling a rehearing. There now will be a separate proceeding in the USPTO on the question of who owns the patent claims, said Jack Evans, a Microsoft spokesman. Andy Culbert, Microsoft associate general counsel, said the company is pleased to have another opportunity to establish that it is the original inventor of the disputed technology. The news is the latest twist in a case that began in 1999, when Eolas first filed suit against Microsoft for infringing on its patent for embedding interactive content in a Web site. Eolas said Microsoft violated its patent in its implementation of ActiveX in Internet Explorer. Eolas, a spin-off of the University of California, was awarded a $520.6 million judgment in August 2003. However, an appeals court threw out that ruling in March 2005 and ordered a new trial to determine the patent's validity. In September 2005, the USPTO upheld Eolas' patent. Disputes over U.S. patents appear to be coming to a crucial crossroads, with patent litigation running rampant and increasing polarization between those who seek strong software patents and those who think that software should not be patentable. Microsoft recently heated up the debate when company executives said in a magazine article that it would aggressively seek royalties for patents the company says it holds for technologies in open source software. Some think U.S. lawmakers should enact patent reform laws to minimize litigation or prevent patent cases from dragging on for years. The Supreme Court recently made it a little more difficult for companies to prove that their patents are valid in an instance where there could be many competitors trying to solve the same problem. In an April 30 ruling in the case KSR v. Teleflex, the Court weakened the position of a patent holder if it created a technology that another company may have invented previously or around the same time, but did not yet file for a patent.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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SEATTLE _ Microsoft left its first-ever appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday encouraged about its chance of winning a case that could have broader implications for patent protection of software sold overseas.
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The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) moved a step closer to overturning a Web browser plug-in patent at the heart of a multi-million dollar dispute between Microsoft (Quote, Chart) and Eolas Technologies.
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Microsoft won a round in its battle with patent licensing company Timeline.
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As first reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop, the retrial of the long-running Eolas v. Microsoft case has come to an abrupt end. Eolas shareholders were notified on Monday, Bishop learned, to expect a very special dividend of between $60 and $72 per share.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft presented oral arguments Wednesday before the U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-year-old patent lawsuit filed by AT&T whose outcome could require U.S. software companies to pay fines for patent-infringing software assembled in other countries. At issue in the case is how the court will interpret an obscure section of U.S. patent law, Section 271F, which says that if a U.S. company makes product components in the U.S and supplies them to companies overseas -- and the products assembled from those components result in patent infringements -- the company must pay patent damages for products assembled overseas as well as those made stateside. AT&T originally filed the case in federal court in New York in 2001 claiming that Microsoft infringed on one of its patents for digitally coding and decoding speech in its Windows OS. AT&T set out to recover damages not only from copies of Windows manufactured in the U.S., but also those made in other countries from the master disk of Windows that was sent to those countries and used to assemble computers with the OS installed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in July 2005 upheld a lower-court ruling that Microsoft is liable to pay fines for foreign sales of patent-infringing software even if it was originally created in the U.S. In court Wednesday, Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, an attorney with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, argued Microsoft's case, which claims that the patent law was aimed at closing a loophole that allowed companies to manufacture all of the components of patented inventions in the U.S., but avoid patent liability by assembling those U.S.-made components in other countries. "We believe this law was applied improperly by the lower court to find liability based solely on computers manufactured overseas," Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in a statement. "A U.S. patent was never meant to apply to conduct that takes place entirely abroad." Therefore, Microsoft is asking that the Surpeme Court reverse the lower-court ruling. In a statement, Abha Divine, president and CEO of AT&T Knowledge Ventures, said the company believes that all U.S.-based sources of innovation, including the software development community, can benefit from patent laws that allow for "appropriate and fair" protection of all new inventions and technologies. The outcome of the case will depend on how the Supreme Court interprets the words "components" and "supplies" in the law, said John E. Daniel, partner in law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel's Intellectual Property Department in New York. "Some people have a concern that [the lower court ruling] seems to be beyond what was intended," he said. "When [Congress] passed the legislation,Â it was thinking of making physical components, not software. The comeback is, 'What's the difference?' You still make copies, and Microsoft makes money based on people selling those copies." Microsoft has had some unusual allies in this case, such as its former nemesis the U.S. government and competitor Yahoo, both of whom have filed briefs in support of the vendor's argument. Companies fear that a precedent may be set that will potentially cost U.S. software companies millions of dollars in fines. There is also a concern that U.S. companies will take their research and development offshore to avoid fines, Daniel said.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft presented oral arguments Wednesday before the U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-year-old patent lawsuit filed by AT&amp;T whose outcome could require U.S. software companies to pay fines for patent-infringing software assembled in other countries.
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A legal row between Microsoft and AT&T about overseas patents heads to the US Supreme Court.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Google may be seeking a reopening of state and federal government antitrust action against Microsoft, but a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) official has recommended against it, newspaper reports indicated Sunday. Google alleged that Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system puts other search software companies at a disadvantage, making it difficult for users to employ non-Microsoft desktop-search software, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing lawyers familiar with the case. Microsoft's own desktop indexing system is almost impossible to turn off, Google claimed in a white paper sent to both the DOJ and states' attorneys general, thereby affecting a computer's performance when running non-Microsoft search index, the report said. Microsoft denied the accusations, saying that its own search indexing could be turned off, although with some difficulty, and that its program did not interfere with the operation of other search indexing software and therefore did not influence performance, according to the report. Despite Google's efforts to draw its rival into a protracted legal fight, the company's antitrust cries are falling on deaf ears, especially at the DOJ, which fought Microsoft over monopoly accusations in the late 1990s until a settlement in 2002, according to The New York Times, which also cited lawyers close to the case. Thomas O. Barnett, now the DOJ's top-ranking antitrust official, recommended in May that the DOJ and state attorneys general reject Google's complaint, the report said. Formerly employed by a law firm that represented Microsoft during the DOJ antitrust suit, Barnett did not work on the case before joining the DOJ, and recused himself from involvement in the DOJ's ongoing monitoring of Microsoft that is part of the 2002 settlement, the report said. However, some state prosecutors may take up the case with or without the DOJ, which is slated to be heard in Federal District Court in Washington later this month, it said.
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The US Patent and Trademark Office has preliminarily rejected a Microsoft Corp. patent on a system for recognizing computer files, a victory for &quot;open source&quot; advocates who believe
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The Penguin is missing, while Apple's gone to Hollywood Comment For all but three of the past 17 years, Microsoft has been involved in antitrust litigation with government agencies. That's enough to wear anyone down. But as Europe's highest appeals court delivered its judgement on Monday, I did notice some ennui - not from dogged old hacks, but from a new generation of pundits.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - A judge in a San Diego court late Thursday dismissed one of several patent claims Alcatel-LucentÂ has made against Microsoft in several high-profile cases against the vendor, but that does not mean the software company is out of the woods yet. According to Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans, a judge in the U.S. District Court in San Diego ruled that Microsoft does not infringe a patent for speech-recognition technology asserted by Alcatel-Lucent. This is the only patent that was to be considered during a second trial in the series of claims, which had been scheduled in San Diego on March 19, he said. That trial has now been cancelled. Last week, a jury in the first of what had been six separate patent-infringement casesÂ ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billionÂ in damages to Alcatel-Lucent for infringing on patents for MP3 encoding and decoding technology. It was believed to be the largest patent-infringement damage award in history in the case that the then Lucent Technologies first filed against Microsoft and partners Dell and Gateway in 2003. Many believe the decision could put other companies that use MP3 technology at risk for patent-infringement claims from Alcatel-Lucent. The next and third case dealing with Alcatel-Lucent's patent-infringement claims, which focuses on user-interface technology and lists Microsoft, Dell, and Gateway as defendants, is scheduled to be held May 21, Evans said. Three other trials on Alcatel-Lucent patent-infringement claims will follow this year, with Microsoft being listed as defendants in two of those. The Alcatel-Lucent suit is not the only major patent case Microsoft is currently dealing with. Microsoft presented opening arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court last week in a six-year patent dispute with AT&T.
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The United States Patent Office (USPTO) has issued a Notice of Allowance for Patent Protection for a groundbreaking seawater desalination process developed by Long Beach Water Department engineers.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. district judge on Tuesday praised the schedule set up in a revamped technical documentation project that's part of the 4-year-old antitrust settlement between Microsoft Corp. and the U.S. government. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, hailed a new plan that would deliver 58 documents related to Microsoft's software communication protocols by Dec. 15, with more documents coming in February, April and May. Kollar-Kotelly in May approvedÂ a two-year extension to parts of her antitrust judgment against Microsoft because of ongoing problems in the technical documentation for Microsoft's software communication protocols. "I hope this approach works," Kollar-Kotelly said during Tuesday's antitrust compliance hearing. "We seem to be on the correct time table." Kollar-Kotelly, in an antitrust settlement approved in November 2002, ordered Microsoft to create the technical documentation so that competing software companies can buy licenses to Microsoft's communications protocols and make products that work with Microsoft software. The judge expressed support for the new plan after numerous delays and past complaints about the quality of technical documentation."We'll have to see if this achieves the [results] that have eluded us so far," she said after Microsoft representatives explained the technical documentation "reset," as they called it. Under the plan, Microsoft delivered 32 technical documents to the court-mandated technical committee overseeing the settlement by Oct. 25, and is on track to deliver another 26 documents by Dec. 15. The technical documentation that's most useful to protocol licensees will be delivered first, Microsoft said. The schedule has Microsoft delivering another 99 technical documents between Feb. 22 and May 29. About 90 days after the initial release of a document, Microsoft will give the technical committee and licensees an online build of the document. In addition, there were 943 identified problems with the current technical documentation as of Oct. 31, up from 835 problems identified as of Sept. 30, according to court records. Microsoft will work on fixing those problems as part of the revamped documentation project, said Robert Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business. Lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice and some of the plaintiff states in the antitrust case said the documentation plan seems to be working. But Stephen Houck, a lawyer for the California group of state plaintiffs in the case, noted that hundreds of problems still exist in the current documentation. "While much as been accomplished, there's much left to do," Houck said. Muglia walked the judge through an example of the new technical documentation, and Kollar-Kotelly noted the new version had "a lot more details." "My only wish is that it had been done earlier, so we wouldn't be at this point," she said.
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NOVEMBER 18, 2004 (REUTERS) - Microsoft Corp. warned Asian governments today that they could face patent lawsuits for using the Linux operating system instead of its Windows software.
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A U.S. judge praises a new timeframe for Microsoft to fix its technical documentation required in its antitrust settlement.