Microsoft Wins US Import Ban On Motorola's Android Devices 200
jbrodkin writes "The U.S. International Trade Commission today ordered an import ban on Motorola Mobility Android products, agreeing with Microsoft that the devices infringe a Microsoft patent on 'generating meeting requests' from a mobile device. The import ban stems from a December ruling that the Motorola Atrix, Droid, and Xoom (among 18 total devices) infringed the patent, which Microsoft says is related to Exchange ActiveSync technology. Today, the ITC said in a 'final determination of violation' (PDF) that 'the appropriate form of relief in this investigation is a limited exclusion order prohibiting the unlicensed entry for consumption of mobile devices, associated software and components thereof covered by ... United States Patent No. 6,370,566 and that are manufactured abroad by or on behalf of, or imported by or on behalf of, Motorola.' Motorola (which is being acquired by Google) was the last major Android device maker not to pay off Microsoft in a patent licensing deal. Microsoft has already responded to the decision, saying it hopes Motorola will now reconsider."
Re:Justice was fairly served (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, if Microsoft were held to that particular standard they would have been out of business a long time ago.
Re:Justice was fairly served (Score:5, Informative)
It is time to step up and show Google the door. If you cannot do business honestly, don't do it at all.
I'm not sure if you are trying to be sarcastic or not. I mean, remember, the other party to this suit is Microsoft.
And oh by the way Google doesn't own Motorola yet, and did not own Motorola when the devices in question were designed. But don't let a little thing like facts get in the way of your shilling or trolling or whatever it is that you're doing.
The patent (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the patent in question:
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=L-ELAAAAEBAJ&dq=6,370,566 [google.com]
The present invention includes a mobile device which provides the user with the ability to schedule a meeting request from the mobile device itself. The mobile device creates an object representative of the meeting request and assigns the object a global identification number which uniquely identifies the object to other devices which encounter the object. In addition, the mobile device in accordance with one aspect of the present invention provides a property in the object which is indicative of whether the meeting request has already been transmitted. In this way, other devices which encounter the meeting request are capable of identifying it as a unique meeting request, and of determining whether the meeting request has already been transmitted, in order to alleviate the problem of duplicate meeting request transmissions.
Is that really patentable? Assigning a unique ID to a meeting request to alleviate duplicate requests? How can that not be obvious to someone "skilled in the art"?
Is there any other solution that's more obvious? "Hey Joe, I keep getting duplicate meeting requests from your Palm Pilot. Oh noooooos! Hey, I know, I'll send each meeting request in a different color, then if you get two purple ones you'll know it's a dupe".
Generating meeting requests (Score:1, Informative)
Like an email list and a a send all message with a click to respond and a pop up reminder x minutes beforehand? Like I had when I used prodigy in 1998?
Normally I'm a fan of Microsoft, but this sounds unreasonable.
Re:Why the google hate? (Score:5, Informative)
Google hasn't purchased Motorola yet, much less before the lawsuit.
Approval from various government agencies is required before the purchase occurs (which is why it hasn't yet, as the Chinese authorities which have to approve it haven't.) So your statement that the purchase had occurred but hadn't yet been approved by the required government agencies is self-contradictory.
Re:Why the google hate? (Score:2, Informative)
There is, it's duckduckgo.com. They do sell ads, but you are free to disable them. Search rankings do not suffer from any manipulation, marketing driven or otherwise.
Re:Justice was fairly served (Score:5, Informative)
have you even heard of Microsoft Research?
Yes.
Here's a list of their output. http://www.quora.com/Microsoft-Research/What-products-have-come-out-of-Microsoft-Research [quora.com]
Perhaps you'd like to select a few highlights of genuine innovation for us to discuss here?
Re:Justice was fairly served (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sorry but they actually do have some good stuff. Last month we studied one of their research about Poisson Image Editing, which was awesome to say the least.