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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."
And the plot thickens... They are doing this (as the article states) to keep Linux and other OSs from being compatible. By breaking their network filesystems they force people to upgrade, stay away from free alternatives, and make more and more money.
This will also be to make sure that DRM can succeed. If there were ways around their "innovations" for security what good would it do? First thing you have to do is break networking and make sure that only other secured machines can talk.
Remember people: the end of computing as we know it is coming fast.
Why do we let a convicted monopolist obtain patents?
It seems a no brainter that they should not be allowed to protect any IP until a nonmonopolistic market restored.
"Right to innovate" be damned. You illegally got in top, now you can be made to share the top spot, a la the Sherman Act.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Are they going to break all compatibility with their older OSs? If they don't, can't Linux/OS X/etc. still connect? If they do, don't they risk pissing off businesses?
It will be really interesting to hear Miguel's views on this! Earlier on, he stated that MS patents wouldn't be an obstacle for Mono and .Net based development on non-MS platforms...
I guess when Microsoft hands over a stack of patent applications, we should respond with a stack of examples of prior art (surely they must exist)? Either that or start applying for patents first and if they're granted make them publicly licensed under certain conditions (e.g. for OSS)? Of course, that makes open source the demon... argh.
Of course, knowing the patent office, they'll just rubber stamp Microsoft's applications. Right next to 1-Click and that new method of swinging one.
The USPTO only has one type of patent. The "I want a monopoly on this" patent. 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." The cost should be (much) lower and they should be approved faster and nobody should own them. That way you know right off what's going on.
I also like the proposed reforms making large companies who apply for lots of patents pay much more and individuals pay much less.
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At one time they did.
Read the book: Big Blue: IBM's use and abuse of power.
This book is literally an education on monopolist behavior. If you read it, you would amazed at how many of IBM's dirty tricks are practiced by Microsoft.
One very important lesson. The monopoly and especially lock in are the most important things. Even more important than short term profitability. Even more important than staying within the law.
After all the law will do is fine you. Maybe even painfully. But in the end, you still have a monopoly with locked in customers. You can charge what economists call "monopoly rents". So you're still in control of the game. Nothing is more important than maintaining the monopoly.
Anyway, I'm off topic. But the book is a very interesting read of things done in decades past that many here are too young to remember.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Publication has most of the properties the grandparent wanted: turnaround time is typically 6 months to a year (depending on whether you go conference or journal), costs are minimal (usually a few hundred dollars for a conference, less for journal), and it gets disseminated to a wide audience.
The downside is that the bar for patents appears lower than for publication; it seems like I'm always reading on Slashdot about patents that are successfully granted for ideas that do nothing to advance the state of the art, which leads me to suspect that there may be a "gray area" of ideas that are patentable (at least under our current system) but would have difficulty being accepted for publication. This is probably where "defensive patenting" would be useful.
Another view is that big companies patent lots of things, and then by the implicit threat of suing the "small guy", prevent innovation from moving forward. In practice this is harder than it sounds, since the damage to the image of the company can be considerable if it tried to sue a small target - that's why you rarely see it happen.
In the mind of everyone who would learn about and understand such an action, Microsoft's image has already been damaged. For most of their customers, however, such an attack by Microsoft would slip under the radar... which is probably why Microsoft apparantly has no moral objections to making such threats against small targets and why people like this blogger can talk about that situation as if it were a hypothetical "view" rather than a recent occurance.
Then you better join a campaign outlawing hardware-level integration of DRM. Because that's the only way I can think of to stop it.
IIRC, TCPA doesn't have to be enabled. That means you can still use newer hardware, just without the abilities granted by "trusted computing."
I'm not really a consumer of streaming multimedia, so I don't see a problem for me.
That doesn't mean I don't fight it...I've written my congressmen several times, even if I only get boilerplate letters back saying "blah blah blah we don't have the authority to pass laws regarding blah, so blah..."
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No surprise that a giant diversified tech company pumps out the patents (legitimate or not). IBM has roughly 40,000 products and services. It's, what, an order of magnitude larger than MS in that respect? Much of that is hardware, with real engineering behind it. Simple math. I think their R&D horizon is something like 50 years, too.
BTW, it's 10/week, in TFA.
Damn those pesky terrorists