One Patent Claim Against Microsoft Dropped
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Judge dismisses one of several patent claims by Alcatel-Lucent against Microsoft, but others remain.
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A Chinese firm making iPods for Apple Computer Incorporated has dropped its defamation lawsuit against two journalists who accused the company of mistreating workers.
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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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Microsoft seems to not have learned much from the antitrust suits brought against it.
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Research in Motion lost part of the case on appeal, but it&#39;s not over until it&#39;s over. Specifically, the patent infringement finding against the maker of the email device was upheld by the appeals court.
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A US appeals court upheld a patent infringement finding against BlackBerry e-mail device maker Research In Motion Ltd. on Tuesday, but struck down part of the ruling and
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Microsoft has revealed that its patent deal with Linspire doesn&#39;t cover the new version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the company&#39;s latest effort to distance itself from the GPLv3.
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In a preliminary ruling, the government rejected Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)'s 1996 patent on technology for saving files on computers using easy-to-remember names...
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Microsoft has lost a patent battle in South Korea concerning input mode technology in its Office software. The decision could force the Redmond company to halt sales of the popular productivity suite in that country, but it is fighting back.
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Plans by Microsoft Corp to charge royalties on a library of patents are looking uncertain after the US Patent and Trademark Office rejected a key software patent claimed by the company.
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A Chinese firm drops a lawsuit against two journalists who claimed labour abuses on its iPod assembly line.
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The controversial Eolas Technologies patent looks like it is about to be rescinded by the US Patent Office. The office has confirmed that it has rejected all of the 10 patent claims that it re-examined.
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Patent infringement found; split decision sends part of case back to lower court.
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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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Blog: One of the many companies defending itself against a patent lawsuit filed by Visto has settled for an undisclosed amount.
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Microsoft Corp. is fighting a rejection by U.S. patent authorities of a patent for its FAT (file allocation table) file system, the company said Thursday. Meanwhile, it's celebrating a jury decision clearing it of patent infringement charges related to a feature in its Office software.
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In a preliminary ruling, the government rejected Microsoft Corp.âs 1996 patent on technology for saving files on computers using easy-to-remember names.