Microsoft Researching Patent Law with New Experts

wikinerd writes "According to The Register, Microsoft seeks to hire new patent experts. In their words, patent experience itself "is helpful but not mandatory" and advance knowledge of patent law is not required. The applicants need only be Computer Science or Electrical Engineering PhD holders, without any qualification in law. They will be involved in prior art search, patentability research and technical analysis. The article outlines some of the most controversial MS patents, such as online bill payment."

Comments

Re:When will we say "enough"?

[pete6677]

I don't know about you, but I'm not about to fund any massive development efforts if I have no recourse whatsoever should an employee of mine decide to sell my source code to a competitor. I agree that software patents in general are a bad idea, but there's no reason why someone should not be able to protect their proprietary work in any way, such as with copyrights.

Interesting

[Pan T. Hose]

Condidering the fact that getting a PhD in CS and EE is fairly easy these days, we should expect a lot of idiotic "methods and aparatii" from those new kids. Then couple of frivolous lawsuits against small corporations as a testing ground and finally against free software will follow during the next decades (probably some easy target, ala bnetd, so people will boycott Microsoft for few ours and then start buying new products, like with Blizzard) but it will result in very bad PR and counterclaims from IBM so the practice will probably be terminated after two (three at most) low-priority lawsuits from the top levels of the management, those new kids will get fired and everything will go back to normal. It will be certainly interesting to watch, but devastating to the US industry which will obviously benefit EU who will rather choose progress than software patents. It will mean stronger domination of Microsoft in the US and weaker in Europe. That of course means that it is a good time to buy stock of SuSE and Mandrake, and sell Red Hat.

IP law is very different

[plopez]

I hope some of the real lawyers that read this site can confirm or discredit this.

Anyway, a friend of mine who happens to be a lawyer, when I asked what she knew about IP law stated that is so different from other types of law it has its own bar exam. Unless you actually pass that exam you are not really qualified to work on IP cases or to give legal advice. She said she will not touch IP law in any form because, in effect, it would be malpractice (I, of course, was hoping for some free advice :). Lawyers who work on IP issues tend to be very specialized and the firms they work for tend to be specialized as well.

I have to wonder if by hiring unqualified people MS is heading for lots of problems.