Microsoft Sued Over Patent Infringements 162
Foobar of Borg writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Microsoft is being sued over alleged infringement of three patents held by Visto Corporation. The patents in question relate to the handling of information between servers and handheld telcom devices.
Jack Evans, a Microsoft spokesman, has not commented on the case itself, but has simply stated that 'Microsoft stands behind its products and respects intellectual property rights.'"
Re:Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
There are these things called "Patent Libraries" that contain (now follow me here, it gets tricky) "patent information"...
Where I used to work, we had a site license that allowed everyone to conduct searches against an online Patent Library - you could type in a few keywords and within seconds it would show you patents related to your keywords.
I had a boss who was obsessed with getting his name on a patent, even if it had nothing to do with the companies core competencies, so any time anyone would blurt out something during a brainstorming session, he'd do a quick patent search and say "nope, someone already owns that idea".
Re:Patents (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, with software the boundaries are blury. What can you patent as in invention? The ability to skin an app? The ability to click a button on a website to initiate a purchase? The ability to increment a variable?
Pretty soon we'll have to check every applet, function, line of code we write to see if anyone has patented what we're trying to do. As I live in the EU I'm not lumbered with these worries, but the day will come when I am.
Re:Visto's press release (Score:5, Interesting)
Bureacracies always reach out and try to take more power - once patents simply protected implementations - now the patent office is reaching out to get a stranglehold on stuff like "business methods" and algorithms (math) and essentially ideas - many of them common sense to the problem being solved.
Patents are for society, not the individual. It's supposed to push progress forward by opening non-obvious ideas for everyone for a limited time. Not MONOPOLIZE obvious ideas for the benefit of one person against the rest of society.
To fix patents, we don't need more patent clerks (federal employees), we need to:
1. Go back to old way patents were done - which includes working implementation upon application. Thus ideas become unpatentable. Same with business methods. It will also render 90% all the unreadable legalese to obscure what you are patenting obsolete.
2. Punish non-English application. No, I don't mean application in a foreign language, just the ones that read like they are. Plain english is a must. Jail time in Gitmo otherwise.
3. Raise price to apply for patent to $10,000-50,000 (refundable only on recieving a patent) - while it may seem to screw the "little guy" it actually will kill corporations trying to patent every little thing. Even a little operation will be able to afford to patent 1 WORTHWHILE application, but will corporate America still be able to afford to apply for 10's of thousands of trivial patents?
THE KEY
4. Part of application fee (say 1/2) will go as a bounty to anybody who can disprove it - in other words show prior art, etcetera. This could be anybody - college students, professors, employees of another company.
Why hire clueless clerks when you could flocks of knowleable people examining patents because of a profit motive to turn them down? They won't have the power to deny a patent, they bring the case against it.
5. No renewable patents. Lower patent length from 17 years to 9 years or so. Back in the 1700's, business and the pace of life overall was slower, let's reflect that.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)