Microsoft sued on 'patent breach'
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French phone equipment firm Alcatel sues Microsoft, accusing it of infringing seven of its patents.
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Microsoft on Thursday filed lawsuits against 23 companies in California and Florida, alleging distribution of counterfeit software.
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Microsoft is appealing a $565 million judgment awarded to Eolas, a spinoff of the University of California, in a patent infringement case.
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Certicom, a vendor of encryption tools, has filed a lawsuit claiming that Sony's use of the AACS and DTCP content protection technologies infringes on two U.S. patents.
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Opinion: Is Microsoft getting ready to explore intellectual property lawsuits against Linux and open-source software? If you can&#39;t beat them, sue them?
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Microsoft argued in a Luxembourg court on Thursday that the European Competition Commission&#39;s antitrust decision against it would infringe on its intellectual property and cause serious and irreparable harm to the company.
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Bloomberg News broke the news yesterday that Microsoft will be allowed to argue that patents held by research firm Eolas Technologies regarding the ability to embed functionality in a Web browser page are invalid, when a retrial of Eolas' long-running patent suit begins on July 9.
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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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Company alleges patent infringement by rival disk maker GS Magicstor.
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US software giant Microsoft Corp has sued a group of &quot;spammers&quot; who it accuses of sending unsolicited e-mails promoting pornography to millions of its customers, documents showed.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is suing a group of hackers who apparently gained access to the company's proprietary source code, creating a program that wipes media files clean of file-sharing restrictions. The suit, which Microsoft filed last Friday in a district court in Seattle, Washington, gives only a nickname for the ringleader, "viodentia," who is one of 10 "John Does" whom Microsoft believes are responsible for breaking its Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. Last month, a program calledÂ FairUse4WM surfacedÂ that removed the DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology from Windows Media 10 and 11 files. Many major download services, such as Napster, use Windows DRM, and its removal would allow the files to be copied without restriction or uploaded to file-sharing networks. Microsoft is suing for copyright infringement, since FairUse4WM uses code from the company's Windows Media software development kit version 9.5, a toolset used by software developers to build applications. Microsoft said the hackers have caused it more than $75,000 in losses. It is seeking a permanent injunction against the defendants and compensation. In a separate document filed with the court, Microsoft said the defendants have gone to substantial lengths to hide their identities. It asked for extra time to issue subpoenas to e-mail service providers, to track down some e-mail addresses linked to the individuals, to help it to identify them. The hackers have proved enduring foes for Microsoft. Soon after FairUse4WM was released, Microsoft issued an update to its DRM software, making the hacking program ineffective. The hackers responded less than a day later by updating FairUse4WM again. Their efforts are unlikely to affect the growth of legitimate download services, however, since content providers are aware that no DRM is unbreakable, analysts said. "I think in the long term it's not going to deal Microsoft any crushing blow, but it's certainly an irritant for them," said Jonathan Arber, research analyst for Ovum in London. Technology companies will have to make it too hard for hackers to break the DRM, a leap that could be difficult considering any update to the DRM technology would still have to be compatible with hardware in the market, said Paul Jackson, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Additionally, frequent software updates tend to alienate users, he said. "Itâs a question of highly determined hackers desperate to prove their moxie, versus a corporation that can't release updates every 10 minutes because that annoys people," Jackson said.
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Novell Inc. sued Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O on Friday, claiming that the world&#39;s largest software maker used its Windows monopoly to hurt sales of the WordPerfect processing program, which the smaller rival owned briefly a decade ago.
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News that Microsoft must pay $1.5bn for infringing MP3 patents may have widespread effects, experts say.
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A group of California cities and  counties on Friday filed a class action lawsuit against  Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O, saying the world's largest software  maker overcharged them for software.
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A claim originally filed against Palm and Handspring claimed the now-joined companies violated a patent for portable computing devices. Not so, says the judge.
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Undisclosed payment over rights violation claim Microsoft has settled a long-running patent infringement suit with Eolas and the University of California in a case which has been running since 1999. Microsoft will make an undisclosed payment to Eolas.â¦
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SEATTLE -- Microsoft Corp. on Thursday lost the first of six patent lawsuits brought by Paris-based telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, and a federal district court jury set damages at $1.5 billion.