Microsoft Assembles Patent Arsenal for Longhorn

stock writes "The heat is on. Inside eweek.com are some remarkable articles: 'You see, Microsoft is busy patenting everything it can lay its hands on with all three. In fact, Microsoft is now building up its patent arsenal, applying for a rather amazing 10 patents a day. The idea isn't to ensure that Microsoft makes a fair profit from its patents; it's to make sure that no one else can write fully compatible software.' An older article mentions some other patents."

Comments

Re:Well that proves it.

[mopslik]

When has Microsoft EVER used patents as a tool for gaining market control?

How about using patents to extract FAT licensing fees from removable solid state media manufacturers? Or is that too easy?

Re:This is why there needs to be "Defensive Patent

[Qzukk]

There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."

Actually, there are. They're called Statutory Invention Registration these days. For a very small fee you can just register that you invented something, without actually obtaining patent protection for it. But, the patent office will have that you invented it on file.

Re:This is why there needs to be "Defensive Patent

[cperciva]

There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."

These already exist. They're called publications. Once you've published something, nobody else can patent it (and you can't either, once a one-year time limit expires).

The only case where someone else could patent a method which you are already using is if you've kept the method a secret -- which is exactly what the patent system is designed to stop.

While there can be no doubt that the actual implementation of the patent system is severely flawed, the overall purpose and approach -- using the granting of monopolies to encourage people to publish their research instead of keeping it as "trade secrets" -- is certainly reasonable.