Microsoft gets big patent verdict overturned
A federal court on Tuesday reversed an earlier ruling that Microsoft's product activation technology infringed on another company's patent, overturning a $388 million verdict in the case.
In a ruling on Tuesday, the court vacated the earlier decision and decided the case in Microsoft's favor.
"We are pleased that the court has vacated the jury verdict and entered judgment in favor of Microsoft," Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said in a statement.
Tuesday's ruling is the latest twist in a case that has had plenty of them. Microsoft initially won a summary judgment ruling, which would have ended the case in its favor, but Uniloc appealed that ruling and a federal appeals court last year ruled that the case needed to go to trial with regard to two counts.
The victory in the Uniloc case comes as Microsoft is awaiting the result of an appeal in another patent case in which the custom XML feature in recent versions of Word was found to infringe on patents held by Canada's I4i. If it fails in its appeal bid, Microsoft faces damages of more than $200 million in that case as well as an injunction that would halt sales of word with the infringing feature.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
I got better. >_>
Anyone thinking i4i is a patent troll should do a little research. They developed the tech and are currently using it. They've also looked into OOo and found them to not violate the patent, therefore no lawsuit.
Since i4i is actively using the technology they developed, they're not a patent troll.
A better argument would be had in denying the validity of said patent due to prior art.
On the other hand, those who have more money can pay the lawyers and those who pay the lawyers are those who usually win. Anyone watch Boston Legal?
The FAT patent is a case in point. It was declared invalid, and continues to be invalid in most of the world. Yet MS managed to have it reinstated in the US, and on that basis, got a Dutch company to shell out a lot of money to MS.
The US patent system indeed needs to be fixed, but Microsoft's cases are not poster children for that.
Intellectual property theft (real) is a crappy thing, and if someone really steals it, chances are you didn't have a patent . . . that sort of thing is still wrong though.
The system is just broken; these large awards just encourage people to milk the system, and make real cases look invalid.
Now, if common sense wants to go for round 2 they could:
1) Overturn file sharing cases
2) Throw Vanilla Ice in jail for not paying Queen royalties for stealing their song
:D
Maybe not.
Throw Vanilla Ice in jail for crimes against music.
There are always cases of prior inventions for many silly patents out there, including the Activation case. Other patents such as using an "XML markup to describe a document", are obvious to a techie, but to normal people (such as a jury), it may be difficult to get them to understand both the implication of the patent (especially to current software applications using similar methods) and how the underlying basis of the patent is something that any techie could have come up with given than XML is already an open standard.
In this particular case, I would say yes, good for Microsoft. I'm glad they won this case because I too, could have been sued as well as at least one million other programmers out there who have programmed XML, used content management software, or developed any sort of meta tagging system for documents. How pathetic.
Also, all patents should have a much shorter life-span (5yrs or less)
It will take us a several years of brisk sales to recoup the investment. This product is not a profit center, it is a life saving device for small aircraft, which is why we keep on.
I might add, the US Constitution (which grants the right to have patents) does not specify a time. It's interesting that copyright is so much longer than patents. It seems to me that they should be equal durations because the Constitution mentions them in the same passage.
Bill
- by Ronald J Riley October 6, 2009 6:43 PM PDT
- Isn't it obvious by now that Microsoft and other members of the Coalition for Patent Fairness are serial infringers?
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(30 Comments)Ronald J. Riley,
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