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Microsoft Found Guilty of Patent Infringement
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 $8.96m.
The patent in question is a method to transfer data between Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access using a single spreadsheet."
Patent infringement is not a crime
Yet.
I'm afraid of making any sort of software, even for fun. If it somehow leaves my PC goes public, someone could notice I made it, dig up some old patent, and sue my ass to Hoboken, New Jersey. This leeching is far worse than file leeching, and it's always sad to see that something intended to advance science and the arts (see Sec. 8, Clause 8) is impeding it instead. If it can happen to "M$" with their many IP/etc. lawyers, it can happen, and cause far worse damage, to us. That's -1, Scary to me.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Poetic justice?! Hardly!
The only good that could come of this would be the remote chance that it could convince MS that software patents are a terrible idea and prod them into backing Red Hat and Oracle's push to reform patents in the US and Europe.
Yeh, the same double standard that says landmines are always bad, but that we can ignore temporarily if say, Pol Pot gets one accidentally stuffed up his ass.
Oh wait. That's not a double standard, that's just us cheering when bad things happen to bad people. Whooddah thunkit?
All that they have to do is demonstrate prior art if they're charged with patent infringement
Sorry, but that's simply not the case, as I'm currently serving as an expert witness for a defendant in a patent case. It's not enough to have prior art, you must also convince a jury that you have prior art. Good luck getting a jury of everyday schmoes to understand some complex technical issue.
You see both sides will have expert witnesses, and they will both say how much they believe they are right. Both sides will spout technical jargon and the juries eyes will glaze over. And the jury will determine the winner based on things like who most likable. So if you can paint yourself as some poor schlub who got ripped off by MS, then the technical stuff really doesn't matter. Really. It's fucking sad, but that's how it works.
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