Surfcast Sues Microsoft Over Tile Patent 255
An anonymous reader writes with news of a company suing Microsoft for infringing upon a patent for tiles with live content. From the article: "SurfCast, in a complaint filed yesterday in a U.S. District Court in Maine, said Microsoft infringes one of its four patents — No. 6,724,403 — by 'making, using, selling, and offering to sell devices and software products' covered by SurfCast's patent. That includes mobile devices using the Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 operating systems as well as PCs using Windows 8/RT."
That's a new level of ugly (Score:4, Interesting)
The Microsoft Live Tiles use data that's been curated for the purpose of a tile. SurfCasts is making little windows onto programs that have no idea their being ran in a little window.
Re:Not a troll (Score:5, Interesting)
A tile is just a chromeless application window. What's novel about it?
Re:Not a troll (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to be the same thing and it's a novel way of doing things.
Exactly, it's not like it is similar to an airplane dashboard, right? And did anyone notice the timing? Coinciding a lawsuit with an OS release, that's not suspicious at all, tsk tsk tsk...
Re:Its not like people havent sued MS b4 (Score:3, Interesting)
And lost :)
For the look and feel suit but not the one for stolen source code from Quicktime which ended up in Video for Windows. The latter resulted in an out of court settlement where MSFT bought non-voting shares in Apple, made undisclosed payments rumored to be around a billion in the end and a commitment to continue developing MS Office and Internet Explorer for the mac for 5 years. The MS Office commitment was renewed voluntarily by Microsoft a number of times since then.
Total TROLLL (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, go look at these "screenshots" of product. And tell me how their product was anything different than all the horrible 1990's websites built with frames, that continually refreshed.
Seriously, this shouldn't even go to court....
http://web.archive.org/web/20070420033547/http://www.surfcast.com/images/bloom.jpg [archive.org]
http://web.archive.org/web/20070101195114/http://surfcast.com/images/trading.jpg [archive.org]
http://web.archive.org/web/20070101163517/http://surfcast.com/images/weather.jpg [archive.org]
http://web.archive.org/web/20070126130038/http://www.surfcast.com/images/word_doc.jpg [archive.org]