Slashdot Mirror
InterTrust Says It Owns DRM, Sues Microsoft
Rinisari writes "Fortune.com has a story about Santa Clara-based InterTrust Technologies is claiming that their suite of 26 issued patents and 85 pending patents covers digital rights management technology currently in use by Microsoft. InterTrust is seeking an injunction barring distribution of about 85% of Microsoft's product line, including WindowsXP, OfficeXP, and Xbox. Slashdot previously mentioned InterTrust when Sony and Philips announced they were attempting to buy ( and still are attempting to buy) the DRM outfit."
If Microsoft doesn't own the patents on DRM, and will have to pay royalties to include it, what incentive will they have to include it in their operating systems?
Black and grey are both shades of white.
The worldwide owner of DRM technology patents capable of stopping the XBox being sold will be Sony, the people who make the PlayStation? That's hilarious.
Remember back in the day when Sony fought like hell to make VCRs legal, saying consumers had a right to copy? At Sony Music, do they look back on those court cases and laugh?
That's the nightmare scenario, sure. But I can see some good outcomes, too:
... and eventually we end up with a world where content is available primarily on less restricted platforms. Alternately, Philips stays in the fight and the rest of the content world just kind of grows around the quagmire.
1) InterTrust wins, and wins big. Maybe they then get bought out by Sony and Philips, maybe not; either way, Microsoft has to pay some huge amount of money (and maybe continuous royalties) to someone else -- or scrap years of work on their products and start over. Bad for Microsoft == good for pretty much everyone else in the world. And Microsoft can't just buy InterTrust because they've spent so much damn money paying off the settlement, and/or Sony and Philips (which between them can probably outspend even Billy-boy) throw in their money to keep it from happening.
2) InterTrust loses, and loses hard enough to set a precedent against questionable patents. Although this would be good for Microsoft in the short term, it might be good for everyone in the long term by establishing the precedent that ideas aren't patentable, only implementations, which is the way it should be all along. Unfortunately the article doesn't go into enough detail to judge whether that's a possible outcome, but if it did happen, it would be a Good Thing.
3) The case stalemates (probably because, as in the anti-trust case, Microsoft is clearly guilty, but their money and name recognition keep the case in endless appeals) and Sony and Microsoft end up fighting a years-long war with Intertrust as the proxy. Meanwhile, Philips dissasociates itself from the case and starts working with more consumer-friendly companies
(2), which would probably be the most useful in the long term, is also IMO the least likely. But (1) and (3) seem like real possibilities.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It never worked. So, like all internet boom companies that had ideas, but just vapourware, they are reduced to suing everyone in sight. This is one I want to see Microsoft win.
Actually, MS are salivating over DRM for an entirely different reason: they think business will pay them pots of cash for it.
Just imagine how good a "your documents can't be leaked, can't be stolen, changes can be tracked and you have total control over which employees see what" must sound. It'd make business confidentiality much easier. Pay-per-play is a lucrative area, but DRM has far wider uses than just that.
I've been told by MS execs that there is kind of an internal debate raging about whether micropayments or DRM is the way forward, but that DRM was winning because it could be commercialised and sold as a feature to business. They didn't seem to regard the content industry as the main target for it: individuals and organizations who wished to control their own business information were a big deal.