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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."
Cringley mentions that Burst's technology runs under Linux and Solaris. He alleges that one of Microsoft's motives might have been a paranoid desire to reduce closs-platform competetion. It will be very interesting to see if this allegation is proven in court.
Wow...Microsoft undertaking anti-competitive behavior and holding evidence from a court of law? I don't believe it.
Err...wait...that's the only thing they seem to be doing lately, aside from helping the feds bust 18 year olds for writing worms.
A lawsuit against Microsoft. Geeze, I hope the company I work for issues a decree to install no more Microsoft products until this is worked out in court.
Oh, sorry, thats just for the SCO crap.
That totally boggles the mind that companies/individuals still think that they can play the "electronic ignorance" game with the court and legal computer experts. It seems as if the time of being able to pull the wool over the courts eyes due to the lack of knowledge of technology is slowing coming to an end.
What's even more amazing, in this case, is that it is Microsoft playing "oops, backups? whats that?"
The lawyers printed out all the message (140 boxes) then sorted them by hand it seems to find the missing dates. Maybe they should have used a computer.
...is that they happen again and again. It's cheaper for MS to just pay small companies "small" settlements of $20-50 million.
That's chump change to MS but lots of money to most smaller companies -- so MS just buys it's way out of these lawsuits until the cows come home.
Unfortunately, something like this isn't enough to really nail MS and make them change permanently. I almost yawn when I hear about it right now -- it's somewhat depressing that a strategy like this can work, but it makes great numbers sense.
Due to my own involvement in these kinds of things I'm posting anonymously, which sucks...
Now taking bets on Microsoft's off site back up location mysteriously having lost/erased those tapes.
The reason for this mass erasure, it was explained, is that Burst technology was unimpressive and not of interest to Microsoft, and the e-mails were simply not worth keeping. The probability that they all deleted their emails for the exact same period is of approximately the same order as the probability that there actually is Linux code stolen from SCO.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
Seattle Firefighters will tomorrow be engaged in a struggle to supress a fire after a large explosion at a data center used by Microsoft to store their offsite backups. I cant understand it the Fire Chief will state, the building seems to have flooded with acid and the 2 tons of explosives which were being stored there for some reason exploded, very unusual.
A spokesman for Microsoft will say "its unfortunate" without a hint of irony.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Am I the only one who thinks there should be real penalties for this kind of behavior? I mean, I understand you are supposed to try to win a case and everything, but failing to produce evidence on demand from a court should be punished, especially when the culprit has a history of presenting false and misleading information in court, and encouraging its legal agents to lie under oath. Why the fuck is it that we don't hold Big Faceless Corporations to the same standards of culpability as we hold individuals? If a small business pulled this shit in court, you'd get it up the wazoo, but when Microsoft does it, it's like the judicial system has no memory from one incident to the next.
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...
OK 35 minutes, who'd even know?
35 hours, What? Frigging Veritas... Damnit Bill get them on the phone!
35 Days, OH THAT IS IT! I want the back up guy fired... jeez fellas we're really sorry
35 WEEKS? Yes your honor we were trying to pull one over on you....
This
I forget, is it odd days or even days that software patents are worse than Microsoft on Slashdot?
If you check the related links at that article, you will find another interesting theory by Cringley, who cites any number of cases where MS has ripped off companies, pretending to be interested in buying their technology, but only flirting long enough to steal it. I normally don't like Cringley, but this time he seems spot on.
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."
Coincidentally a large shipment of magnets were just shipped to the address of a S. Ballmer...
Maybe they should have used a computer.
Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to sue us, would you like me to delete all of your files?"
It's Anne Grabowski's birthday! Ice cream cake in Bldg 4-R break room!
Last chance to sign up for this year's Secret Santa/Hidden Hannukah Harry! RSVP with Roger McGillicuddy before December 12th.
Just wanted everyone to know that Bill and Valerie Trammel had a beautiful 8lb, 7oz baby girl at 8:30 last night at Cyprus Creek Memorial Hospital. So let's all welcome little Hortence into the world! Yay!
And so on...
"Yes, your honor, we felt that those e-mails were important enough not to erase from Microsoft's permanent record, but the ones relating to the negotiations for which we were under a legally-binding non-disclosure agreement were just, so, pointless, you know?"
Even listening to the most amazing stories about what happened to huge amounts of moeny, the Federal bankruptcy agent doesn't even look up. He's heard it all before so many times, it's the same old shit. Everybody lies.
I don't suppose you read about any Enron executives going to jail recently, did you? Of course not. What Enron did is no different than what every big corporation does. Some are just better than others and if you steal too much at the wrong time, the house of cards can fall down. Executives don't go to jail for stealing. Can you imagine a trial of executives by their peers -- other executives? "Well, Kenny, you should have used my guys to set up your fake accounts. You wouldn't have been found out for another couple years and you could have paid Ashcroft his cut and moved the rest of the money to a good bank in Grand Cayman by then."
Maybe these standards of culpability that you are referring to only exist in your head? There is certainly not much evidence in the real world of anything that resembles "business morality". Almost every business in the USA is crooked. With a giant overbearing government that has a bloodthirst for taking your money and then returning less than 4 cents on each tax dollar, would a rational being expect anything else? If it's okay for the government to lie, cheat, and steal, why should a small business, big business, investor, or anyone else do different?
If you unplug from the morality that is taught to worker units so they are obedient and efficient, you'll be in for a major wake-up call. Your job is to work and pay your taxes, that is all. And good workers are moral workers. Keeps costs down and profits up. All around you, the country is being looted. The workers are going to wake up one day and realize they are fucked because they've been robbed blind while they've had their faces glued to their television sets, absorbing the latest disinformation from the media and the government.
In this case, they've pruned 37 weeks of related emails from their employees' computers and their mail servers, so what's to stop them doctoring the emails recovered from backups?
I guess there would be a possible problem if an employee had printouts or had forwarded certain emails to another address for whatever reason. Then again, what motivation would that employee have for exposing the cover up?
I don't know how things work in the USA corp envioronment, but would something along the lines of monthly backups duplicated, sealed, and dated, only to be opened in the event of litigation, help in these cases at all? This would both protect the legitimate accuser and the wrongly accused... or perhaps it's not that big a deal, and tampering isn't a logistically attractive proposition.
Now where's my tin-foil hat.
Let's see, $1B or so to AOL for damages to Netscape. About .5B for another recent patent suit. There was a CA consumer class action they tried to settle by "donating" software to schools.
They seem to be on a real losing streak, legally. What am I missing? What's the total for legal damages in court cases to date?
But with $50B in the bank, losing law suits seems just a minor cost of doing business.
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Just wondering... the article says that Burst now only employs two people. I don't know how functional the company still is (their website is up at least), but I would think that like SCO, their primary goal is pursuing this lawsuit. The obvious difference is that Burst seems to have a legitimate claim. After they (hopefully) win the MS case, I would hope that the two people working at Burst would continue to develop their business and their technology, rather than just sitting back on a fat cash settlement or award.
"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
It all makes perfect sense if you consider some Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. Consider the following: #3: Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to. #16: A deal is a deal ...until a better one comes along.
#52: Never ask when you can take.
#60. Keep your lies consistent.
#181: Not even dishonesty can tarnish the shine of profit.
#189: Let others keep their reputation. You keep their money.
#242: More is good...all is better.
a) how impressed they were with the technology
b) how helpful the NDA documents were from Burst
c) how easy it would be to integrate the technology into MS products as soon as Burst was dead
d) how stringing them along and not signing a deal would lead to the necessary death.
At a company I worked for 8 years ago, Microsoft "evaluated" our product for more than a year, then filed a patent application for the fundamental technology behind it. We didn't even have to sue them. We just demonstrated to the patent office that:
1) Microsoft was trying to patent technology that we had been shipping for 3 years.
2) Microsoft had "evaluated" our product for a year before filing for a patent.
3) We had implemented the technologies straight out of textbooks, giving concrete evidence of prior art. (That's one reason we were not foolish enough to try to patent it ourselves.)
The patent application was rejected. The most interesting note about the incident was that it all happened within 2 months - amazingly fast.
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
Instead of communism what I think is worth looking at is Adam Smith's original vision of capitalism. As you likely know, Adam Smith wrote "Wealth of Nations" which laid out the core principles of a capitalist system. However, Adam Smith's vision was not contained in this one book. Rather, Adam Smith always maintained that to build a sustainable and socially beneficial economic system that you needed the basic capitalist system ("Wealth of Nations", 1763) together with the moral system which he detailed in "Theory of Moral Sentiments", 1759.
Because Adam Smith was never able to integrate the two systems of theory that he laid out, morality and capitalism, into one integrated system, there has always been controversy on how to build a sustainable moral economic system. In "Theory of Moral Sentiments", Smith emphasizes that it is sympathy that is a fundamental human motive, while in "Wealth of Nations", Smith instead says the motive is "self-interest". Obviously there is much ground between these two sides of human nature.
Business places a large emphasis on having a strong legal system. As without such a system, many business transactions would cost more, or simply be impossible. It was the Common Law, and strict adherence to it, that enabled a new era of business to flourish. And the Common Law is based on a moral system, much of which was laid out in religious teachings. Thus we can see that morality is the foundation of easy, low-cost, flexible human collaboration and exchange. Put another way, without a strong legal system, based on our moral system, there is no foundation for a mutually beneficial society.
The world has seen how a ruthless amoral company like Microsoft has flourished in a societal and business environment that has no underlying moral foundation. No matter what the cost to the individual and to society, because of Microsoft's monopoly, we are forced to pay the Microsoft tax. Not merely do we have to pay the tax, but in our brief lives, we also suffer the cost of the dearth of innovation that exists under the shadow of a monopoly. And it is not just Microsoft, but nearly all companies that extract money from their customers and deliver far less value than was promised. And today's governments deliver just a miniscule fraction of every tax dollar back to the people in the form of tangible goods and services. The rest disappears because of corruption.
Needless to say, we see in today's world that there is an ever increasing growth of corruption. This increase is due to the fact that the business world and legal system have dropped nearly all adherence to a moral system. Everything is amoral money-centric self-interest. And thus we end up with a corrupt system, an inefficient system, large-scale society ills and the widespread looting that is going on today. Ever wonder how Microsoft is accumulating cash so fast? Immoral monopoly pricing certainly helps. And the energy companies make Microsoft look like a beginner. Furthermore, because there is no care for the welfare of our fellow human beings, nor even any care for Nature herself, we have created vast environmental problems that have a profound negative effect on th
"Yes, we should steal the Burst technology and then.. .
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but that would be wrong!"