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Microsoft vs. Burst.com
rocketjam writes "Robert X. Cringley has an interesting story on one of Microsoft's many little-known legal cases. Burst.com is suing Microsoft, claiming MS negotiated in bad faith for over a year before stealing Burst's patented technology for increasing the efficiency of video and audio streaming. After Microsoft submitted all emails associated with the their dealings with Burst to the court, Burst's lawyers discovered a 35-week gap of missing mail during a critical portion of the negotiations. When the judge learned the Sun vs. Microsoft antitrust case had revealed that MS keeps backups of all emails on over 100,000 tapes stored offsite, he ordered them to come up with the missing messages."
Subject says it all... I was under the impression that Microsoft was forced to keep all emails they sent or received... That was part of an old settlement M$ had with the US government...
*scratchs head* maybe I'm getting senile...
Some of Nikola Telsa's patents were prior to 1900, .
. ht m
.
.
the patent office has been around ALOT longer than
you think
http://techweb.ceat.okstate.edu/ias/firstpatent
Also as to your statement concerning ford and cars,
a 15% change in form or function of a patented device
is grounds for a new patent
Intellectual Property gets more into the abstract
thought ownership, and is the current source of alot
of discontent
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
>As much as Microsoft is likely wrong in this situation.... it shows >more of the woes of software patents. It's too late for us in the >US, but for those of you in Europe.... write your... uhhh, Europie >Congressperson....
>If software patents were legal at the turn of the century, Ford >would be the only car company in the world.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
http://www.m-cam.com/~watsonj/usptohistory.html
The modern concept of the patent was established in England where, in 1449, King Henry VI awarded a patent to John of Utynam for stained glass manufacturing.
"Beginning in 1552, a series of "letters patents" was issued by the Crown. The monarchy began a trend of issuing patents for its own benefit and for the benefit of officers and friends of the Court.4 Patents were issued on entire industries, not just inventions. For example, the Stationers enjoyed complete control over the publishing industry in England. The balance of power soon shifted towards those whom the monarchy decided to favor. Reform began with reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Francis Bacon commented that the Queen would grant patents for any invention that she deemed useful to the country. In an effort to curb further abuses of power, Parliament, in 1624, passed the English Statute of Monopolies, which outlawed all royally sanctioned monopolies. Realizing the importance of protecting inventors and the economic benefits associated with encouraging innovation, an exception was allowed for patents of "new manufactures." These patents were awarded to the inventor as long as their new devices did not hurt trade or result in price increases. Additionally, a statutory limit of fourteen years was imposed on English patents."
A good book that alleges that Microsoft does many of the same practices that are alleged by Cringley is "Hard Drive." (at Amazon).
In reality MS probably provided the emails in TIFF format ... I work for lawyers and we get a lot of discovery that way.
Whats wrong with his math? The messagesceases one week before negotiations began, the seven meetings were over a 30 week period and the messages resume 4 weeks later.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
That would be Burst.com vs. Microsoft, not, as used in Slashdot's article title, Microsoft vs. Burst.com.
The classic example of the monopoly is Standard Oil. Now, one of the people responsible for bringing light to Rockefeller's monopoly was the muck-raker Ida Tarbell. She had an interest in bringing Rockefeller to justice: her father was an oil worker in Pennsylvania whose company was put out of business by Standard Oil. Through the writing of a series of articles, she informed the reading public about the misdeeds of the Trust. She also followed Rockefeller personally. Eventually, she wrote a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company. (Note: all of this info is what I remember of some movie about the subject, which I watched in February.)
Back to the present day. How can we (non-trivially) compare $O to M$?
Does anybody else agree? Or am I just full of shit? Or both?
You hit the nail on the head. Have you ever seen the manual for a "Gates Library" computer? The kind that Bill Gates passes out for tax breaks? It's thousands of pages thick. If you are "in charge" of the machine, you have access to a key which enables "Exec" mode...without it, you can't install any files or change anything on the machine. But of course that doesn't cover things like Blaster which install themselves through RPC...and of course, also, only "authorized" people are allowed access to the precious key to fix the machine. The point of all of this is that Bill Gates is as paranoid as any other multi-billionaire (I've had personal ties with one other before, which is where I get my thoughts on the subject.) He's completely obsessed with his OWN security, and certainly that of his corporation. But the common plebian that buys his drivel-software? Who cares.
"Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect of Florence's remarkable
cathedral, won the world's first patent for a technical
invention in 1421. Brunelleschi was a classic man of the
Renaissance: tough-minded, multi-talented and thoroughly
self-confident. He claimed he had invented a new means of
conveying goods up the Arno River (he was intentionally vague
on details), which he refused to develop unless the state kept
others from copying his design. Florence complied, and
Brunelleschi walked away with the right to exclude all new
means of transport on the Arno for three years.
That Florence acceded to Brunelleschi's demands is hardly
surprising. The Italian Renaissance city-states, locked in a
struggle for wealth and power, habitually gave monopolies to
those who would build a needed bridge or mill, or who introduced
some useful craft or industry. They would issue "letter patents"
public declarations that openly (patently) announced the
privilege. What distinguished Brunelleschi's bargain was
invention - he was awarded the exclusive use of his own creation.
(more on Brunelleschi can be found in "Brunelleschi's Patent", Journal of
the Patent Office Society 28 (1946), page 109.
(credit to Greg Aharonian, who used to run a patent industry newsletter mailing list)
DISCLAIMER: I work at a Patent Attorneys firm, but IANAPA.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Here's what I know about this (only a little):
The emails are turned over in their "original" form. Well not really. In the case of Exchange, they would be copied to a PST file and delivered that way. A services firm then goes through the PSF, and creates indexes, TIFF, and maybe extracted text. Or they might OCR the TIFF files. From then on, everyone looks at the images/text. If there's any question about the authenticity, they can go back and find the original.
There's actually manuals of procedures for "electronic discovery", so most of this is standardized. A lawyer probably has limited ability to challenge the process.
I guess that is because there are different text code standard exists on different machines, the text (ascii) file might be all right if everyone use IBM PC. But once you read these files on some other computers, the meaning of texts might changed. While TIFF is a (set of) standard image format, such ambiguity might not exists. Another reason I guess is that image files are much more difficult to be modified than pure text files. Pardon me for my English.
Wow. Lots of errors. First off, MS isn't worth $50B, they have $50B in cash and liquid assets. They are worth far more than that (at least as far as stock market valuations go). As of this weekend, MS has a stock market valuation of $285,646.9 million (said holding pinkie to mouth). For those of you that have problems with decimal math, that's about $285 billion.
At $50M per settlement, 100 settlements leads to $5B. $50B - $5B = $45B. So, 100 settlements will lead to a reduction in total cash and equivalent assets of $5B / $285B of net worth (or less than 1/50 of their net worth). Of course, empirical evidence shows that market capitalizations have less to do with total assets and more to do with total discounted expected future earnings. So losing $5B in cash would reduce their stock market valuation by more than $5B.
It's all pretty bad for Microsoft, but not the end of the world for them. But the math quoted in this post (and most of its children posts) are pretty horrible.
--Be human.
RTFA, Burst barely managed to survive, "shrank to two employees" and then found some lawyers to work on contingency. They had employees, they were developing/marketing products based on their patents. They tried to do a deal with Microsoft and wound up crushed. Now they're suing. Maybe dealing with MS was a bad idea, but it's not supposed to (legally) be suicidal.
Burst.com is the victim here.
Software patents would be a seperate discussion. The topic under discussion here is "Microsoft conceals evidence when sued by the remnants of acompany they had tried to destroy".
You did see the part about 35 weeks worth of evidence withheld from discovery and claimed to have been destroyed ? We'll see this again in a couple of weeks when Microsoft has to show up with the backups that Sun found out they were keeping.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Me personally? A lot. Like 3-4 emails per day are covered by NDA, and the lawyers make us put those silly little sigs that do nothing. Oh, and we use Thawte certificates to encrypt and sign every one of them (well, even the non-NDA ones usually, out of habit).
In the ASIC design industry, I'd say this is pretty common. All discussions between vendor and customer are under NDA, sometimes even before any discussions at all happen there are multiple NDAs in place. And lots of the business (even exchange of IP in source code attachments) takes place by email.
Other industries? I'm not sure.
everything in moderation
Now unless they decided to hire a couple hundred interns to sort through all that, or they used very small boxes, I seriously doubt Burst.com didn't plan this.
Sure there's a lot of data there, but the e-mails in question were delivered in machine-readable format. Now, Slashbots, how do we handle hundreds of thousands of pieces of pretty well homogeneous data?
(Pauses while the shouts of "MySQL!" ring out around him, shakes his head.)
Close enough, anyway. It would be pretty well trivial from a procedural point of view (though it would likely take an hour or two for someone to write the script and a few days of some poor intern swapping DVDs/tapes) to load all the e-mails into a database. Date-sorting then becomes a matter of a one-line query, and they were probably date-sorted before they were printed anyway. Every DB client I've ever used will return such a query in a tabular format that would make it very easy on a quick scroll through to see a big gap in message dates.
They can elect to have a jury trial.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.