Justices Question Microsoft's Vision of Patent Law 106
angry tapir writes "US Supreme Court justices on Monday questioned whether they should side with Microsoft and weaken the legal standard needed to invalidate a patent, with some justices suggesting there are alternatives to changing established law. The issue arose as part of the case involving Redmond and i4i."
Re:I'm confused (Score:3, Interesting)
patents have to be filed within 1 year of the invention being made public
Ah, (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ah, (Score:4, Interesting)
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Patents are government issued monopolies, which completely fail at their primary goal of fostering innovation.
Not only do patents discourage the patent holder from continuing to innovate by shifting their opportunity cost analysis away from innovating and towards monopoly maintaining, but they prevent other prospective innovators from engaging in progressive collaboration, building off of what those before them have done. --And the real salt in the wound, they even prevent the innovations, that DO get developed, from helping society as much as they could, since the monopoly creates an inefficient level of production.
I honestly don't know how they are still seen in such a favorable light. Democrats should be against them, since patents tend to favor big business. Republicans should be against them, since republicans should be capitalists and believe in a free market; free from government intervention and monopolies. People who don't affiliate with either party should just straight-up be smart enough to figure this out on their own...
Re:... and Microsoft will pay for its own success (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents.
And yet it has never done anything about that. It hasn't sued all the distros to stop the operating system. They did use the claim for a bit of FUDdery, but that is not being a patent troll.
Why Did Microsoft Sell Off 22 'Linux-Related' Patents?
That question was posed two years ago. Has there been an answer? Does posing a question that ultimately proved to be a big pile of nothing have any point other than being a bit of FUD back in the other direction?
TomTom gets allies in Microsoft Linux patent lawsuit fight
Microsoft licenses FAT32 to others. It is one of their products. TomTom used and refused to abide by the terms of the license. If they did a similar thing to the GPL license then nobody would think it wrong to go after them. And since this case, has Microsoft gone after any distros that include the file system?
My rule of thumb is that patent trolls don't have products, they just wait in the wings with their patent portfolio. I recently stated [slashdot.org] that I don't consider i4i to be a patent troll either, because they actively use their patents in a product of their own. I don't think that it is a good patent, but they got it so they might as well protect their IP.
Microsoft's Linux patent bingo hits Google's Android
To be fair, the phone industry seems to thrive on cross patent agreements and lawsuits. Who isn't suing everyone else? For example, Microsoft may have done a deal with HTC but Apple did actually sue them. Why does nobody claim that Apple is going after Linux when they do this just as they do about Microsoft?