Microsoft Wins Summary Judgement in Smart Tag Case

dan2bit writes "Business Week reports that a judge in Wisconsin handed down a summary judgement today in favor of Microsoft, defending itself from a patent infringement suit brought by small fish Hyperphrase over the embedding of 'Smart Tags' in Microsoft Office. The suit also produced some amusing minutiae."

Comments

Nothing to do with legality of software patent law

[fredistheking]

"Crabb agreed with Microsoft's argument that XML-based Smart Tags operate differently from Hyperphrase's methods and therefore aren't covered by the patents."

When this issue originally came up many people were hoping that Microsoft might argue against the legality of software patents in general. They completely side stepped the issue. What's going to happen when Ogg gets sued by Fraunhofer and company?

Just what I needed

[dbavirt]

This was a chuckle and a half. I can't understand all you who think it was boring. Apparently the $5 and $10 words scared you off.

I had never seen flyspeck used as a verb before...

Re:AT LEAST THEY DIDN'T USE ALL CAPS

[FreeLinux]

Lawyers love all caps and they use them frequently on most legal documents. For some reason the law seems to think that being all caps makes the document even more binding than if they used lower case.

Re:Isn't MS pro-software patent?

[s20451]

Software patents are like nuclear weapons, their scare value is far superior to their actual use.

Re:Isn't MS pro-software patent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill has gone on record as being against software patents, though I don't know what MS's offical stance is.

Re:Judge Kent's Pigs

[jonblaze]

Actually, the briefs weren't drafted in crayon--that memorandum was just another example of Judge Kent bullying from the bench.

The judge's decision was outrageous.

[ArsSineArtificio]

I've clerked for a federal magistrate, and written several orders granting or denying summary judgment, and I found the order extremely surprising. Microsoft was moving for summary judgment, which is a basically a legal determination that it is so obvious that Microsoft will win that the case shouldn't even bother to proceed. As makes sense, the burden of proof is on Microsoft to have a really good reason for claiming this, and the court should be reluctant to grant it.

Generally speaking, any irregularity should make the court even more reluctant to grant summary judgment. The judge here granted summary judgment even after acknowledging that Microsoft was too late to file - and mocked the plaintiffs for objecting at all! I would expect that Hyperphrase is going to be filing their appeal to the district judge in the very near future.

The judge is forgiving Microsoft for filing late, and is basically telling Hyperphrase to stop being a pain in the ass.

Deadlines exist for a reason. If there weren't definite rules for when and in what order things needed to happen in litigation, the courts would be much more inefficient, and people in court would be denied their constitutional right to due process. Yeah, it's funny that Microsoft filed five minutes late - but there's a big difference between some prisoner struggling to represent himself who files five minutes late, and an enormous multinational corporation with gigantic legal resources doing the same thing. A wink and a nod is inappropriate here.