The Dangers of a Patent War Chest 125
Timothy B. Lee writes "I've got an article in the New York Times in which I make the case against software patents. Expanding on a point I first made on my blog, I point out that Microsoft has had a change of heart on the patent issue. In 1991, Bill Gates worried that 'some large company will patent some obvious thing' and use it to blackmail smaller companies. Now that Microsoft is a large company with a patent war-chest of their own, they don't seem so concerned about abuse of the patent system. I then describe how Verizon's efforts to shut down Vonage are a perfect illustration of Gates' fears."
Re:I am proud to be a European (Score:1, Informative)
That would be about minus 21 years [ffii.org] at the first glance. May I please borrow your time machine?
Not the Timothy B. Lee I thought at first. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I am proud to be a European (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Principals and Profits (Score:5, Informative)
Hahahaha.
Yes, Gates *is* pushing for "patent reform". As in pushing *for* global software patents, in particular pushing really really hard to impose software patents in the EU. Microsoft is *the* 800 pound gorilla driving the entire international pro-software patent lobby. Microsoft has been caught literally authoring supposedly independent government patent legislation and other government documents (ironically leaked by the internal revision history data in Microsoft document formats). Microsoft has been extorting European governments into playing puppet waging Microsoft's political software patent battles in the EU governmental process, threatening to screw with their economy if they don't follow Microsoft's demands to fight for software patents. Things have been pretty quite the last few months, but when all the EU software patent battle stories were popping up here on Slashdot, Microsoft was constantly cropping up and always on the pro-software-patent side.
-
Re:who's suing who? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:who's suing who? (Score:2, Informative)
I would have to disagree. If one has a reasonable apprehension of suit, one can file for declaratory judgment to invalidate the patent or in the hope that the court will declare the product non-infringing.The problem here is that what MS has done, so far, falls into the category of "oblique suggestion". That is probably part of the reason that MS has not and will not state which patents are believed to be infringed; doing so could be construed as a very specific threat.
Saying "that work may infringe my IP" without specifically stating what IP is oblique. Your guitar solo example above is more like saying "that particular portion of your work infringes this particular portion of my IP". Even without saying you may sue, it is specific enough to create a reasonable apprehension. Right now, MS's statements more closely matches the oblique example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaratory_judgment [wikipedia.org]