Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Found Guilty of Patent Infringement

Posted by samzenpus on from the pay-up dept.

Spy der Mann writes "Microsoft has been found guilty of patent infringement and ordered to pay a Guatamalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado almost $9m in damages. The US District Court of Central California court ruled that Microsoft had infringed on his intellectual property and ordered it to pay him $8.96m. The patent in question is a method to transfer data between Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access using a single spreadsheet."

2 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Like little children... by nathanh · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    Like most things at Slashdot, there is a double standard at play here. In other words, the Slashdot fanboys are not as pue as they like to think of themselves as. If it's bad for MS, it's good "just because". Pay backs, you know? Like little children...

    Take your smarmy pseudo-intellectual "I'm so much smarter than all the plebs on Slashdot" attitude and shove it.

  2. Re:Like little children... by dustmite · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Actually only "children" have such 'black and white' views of the world as you exhibit.

    Are you even capable of realising that patents can be bad and MS's ethics can be bad? That doesn't seem like a difficult concept at all to grasp.

    This patent is bad, because not only does it prevent anyone else from doing anything as basic as writing a data converter between a spreadsheet and database (e.g. OpenOffice?), now only Microsoft will be allowed to do so, and for the paltry "purchase price" of $9 million.

    Everyone loses, except some Guatamalan (sp?) individual and MS.