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Burst.com and Microsoft Settle
prostoalex writes "Microsoft and Burst.com announced a tentative settlement, where Microsoft will pay Californian company $60 mln for allegedly stolen multimedia streaming software. Robert X. Cringely provided the recap of the court case back in 2003 (and Slashdot discussion ensued). According to Burst claims, Microsoft entered a non-disclosure agreement with the company to learn about Burst's multimedia streaming technology. Later the technology, for which Burst has 37 patents, has been found in Windows Media Player. When aksed to present the archives of the e-mails and all communications within the company for the trial, Microsoft somehow presented all the documents that preceded before the deal and the documents that followed it. The e-mails during the 35 weeks that negotiations were held mysteriously disappeared. In court Microsoft claimed the e-mails were erased from employee's desktops, e-mail servers and server backups. The technology was not interesting to Microsoft, lawyers insisted, so the electronic trail of communications was erased."
How they attack Microsoft, as their patents can apply to many other multimedia streaming. Who knows what else can be targeted? WinAmp? Hopefully not.
Companies that exist for the sole purpose of patenting ideas and sitting on them disgust me.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
Given that Burst holds mostly trivial and evil software patents (send bursts of data when network conditions are good... GENIUS, I'd NEVER have thought of that! (that's sarcasm, BTW...)), this is pretty much one thief and another, much larger, thief, not a "good guy vs. bad guy" thing.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I know you are trying to be funny but I have worked on exchange/outlook solutions where the ability to permanently delete all email, copies backups etc from/to an employee or on a certain topic at the click of a button has been highly desirable. So much communication is electronic these days that if it 'disappears' then its a case of he said she said and your legal team are already up and running with a major head start.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Perhaps it explains Microsft's recent about face with regards to patents...
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Worked for Michael Jackson at least once before. If victims refuse to testify or recant, it's pretty hard for even the best prosecutor to get a confiction. And with enough money (or intimidation, or both) victims can be made to do those things.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
MS history and monopoly status should make this more then civil.
Cash settlements don't usually end criminal investigations.
Consider Michael Jackson -- cash can stop criminal investigations from even starting.
Closed settlements are bad for criminal investigations, and we only allow them to discourage long trials. This is almost ideal for large companies: a game few can afford, or sealed settlement.
Thanks for putting on the feedbag. Thanks for going all out. Thanks for showing me your Swiss Army knife.
Justice is effectively a myth taught to children in school so that the students will remain mental children, and mature only into useful automatons.
Seriously - justice in the real world is effectively a myth.
Although we all may occasionally perceive real things in the world which might fit our personal conceptions of justice, these are subjective experiences, and at best are only fleeting manifestations of the diversity of reality. The world has so much white noise, it resonates with everything at some point.
If the world were software, "Real Justice" would be rare enough that you wouldn't even need to code an Exception handler for it. In other words, you can safely assume that it doesn't exist.
I think Microsoft realized that settling was a better option that facing obstruction of justice charges and then probably losing anyway. In this day and time, it's pretty much expected that big companies will pay out the occasional settlement for some wrongdoing, but criminal charges tend to result in a drop in stock price, along with possible jail time for certain executives.
As long as we're talking about dubious American corporate practices... I lived in Los Angeles once and was paid to port an accounting package from unix to pc. It was a litttle unusual as you could go in after the fact and juggle all sorts of stuff in rather odd ways.
I was told it was for the movie industry and it was explained to me they would take out 10K in the morning in cash, buy tons of drugs then needed to put it on the books as various production expenses while putting whatever cash was left over, back.
The same company I was a consultant for doing this wanted to bid on a project for the city but it required a $15,000.00 cashiers check. They either didn't want to or couldn't afford it so they got a casheirs check for that amount, photocopied it, deposited the check back into their own account and sent the photocopy of the check with the proposal to the city. When they called weeks later the city was somewhat embarrassed as they could only find a photocopy of the check, not the original. They didn't get the contract and retured the 15K. The vice president had a graduate degree in Hungarian fairy tales (I am not making this up) so it was, to say the least, an entertaining place to work, but, uh...
I quit. I made sure I left lots of rotting fruit hidden in various places. Took them two years to get rid of the flies I heard.
Do I believe Microsoft deleted those mails as uninteresting? Uh, no.
Need Mercedes parts ?
It could be just coincidence, but Burst.com is also a company held by Baystar Capital. These are the people responsible for $50 million in funding for the SCO legal case against IBM over Linux. But then you would have to believe that when Microsoft helped Baystar and SCO meet was a coincidence. And don't forget when Microsoft bought $12 million in SCO licenses when they didn't need them.
And who can forget when Sun bought SCO licenses too and then less than a year later, Microsoft and Sun were best friends and settled their lawsuits with each other.
Maybe some of this stuff is a coincidence and then again maybe none of it is. I find it hard to believe that all of it is a coincidence though.
I don't want to take M$ defense here, what they did is bad. But for all of those who say "How could they have deleted emails ?", well there are two school of thoughts around these days:
- keep all emails, so anything can be tracked back
- file anything that you are legally obliged to keep, and delete everything else, making sure that it doesn't even get backed up.
The second strategy has started to be used after the ENRON fiasco. Most companies still use the first one, but you do start to see more and more (still a small number though) using the former.As someone who's been following this case for two years and bought 22440 shares of BRST, you can not imagine how much I agree with you.
The most comprehensive discussion of this case is over on the Yahoo's BRST message board. Two days ago over there we were all picking out the color of our Porches. Now we're hoping we can get out with our shirts on Monday.