Does Microsoft's settlement fever signal IP offensive?

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Or does Microsoft's settlement fever...

...signal an IP offensive against Microsoft by a computing public fed up with software patents?

http://www.eff.org/patent/
http://www.pubpat.org/
http://www.spi.org/
http://burnallgifs.org/
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=00/09/01/1755259
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/patent-reform-draft/

Beware, Microsoft: those first two organizations actively raise funds, send in their own lawyers (and they've got some good ones) and initiate patent reviews with the U.S. Patent Office. The overall batting record on shooting down patents on review: .500. That's pretty scary if you're Microsoft.

Another thing to consider: not all patents are equally useful to dismantling an adversary. Virtually all the "good" patents came before Microsoft even came into existence or was generating IP, stuff like the Hard Drive, ASCII, VGA, the computer cursor (IBM), the GUI (Xerox), RAM (Intel), the CDROM (Philips). Patents after 1980 tend to be "junk" patents, stuff that the rest of the industry can safely step around. Good example here: Microsoft's Windows Media audio/video file formats. The rest of the world has come up with its own formats (Ogg Vorbis, DivX) and so Microsoft's IP is just not being used much and isn't much of a threat. I can make the analogy: I (IBM) patented the automobile, you (Microsoft) patented the dashboard cigarette lighter. Well, if you get upitty about your cigarette lighter IP and threaten to go after me about it--I just stop offering dashboard electric cigarette lighters (the things are more trouble than they're worth anyway, right?) and my automobile still works just swell. Meanwhile, you're left with IP on something that nobody uses anymore (i.e., WMV, WMA and ASF formats), hence you no longer make any money off of it and it becomes a dead technology.

Posted by: Yen_z   Posted on: 11/09/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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