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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."
Carlos Armando Amado devised a way to connect Excel with Access using a specially crafted spreadsheet during his tenure as a graduate student at Stanford University. After applying for a patent in 1990, Mr. Amando approached Microsoft to license the software, but was denied.
Microsoft then used the same exact method.
Now, while i totally disagree with the idea of patents like this... It changes the story a bit doesnt it?
Heh, after all this is slashdot.
Microsoft invents Microsoft Access.
Guatamalan inventor patents method of transferring data between the two programs.
Does that make any sense to you? Guy didn't invent either program. He's not some disgruntled ex-Microsoft programmer out to get his just dues. He's not some super, uber-leet programmer who came out with "Carlos's Excel" or "Carlos's Access" years before Microsoft did and simply didn't succeed due to lack of marketing. This is some Joe Nobody who filed a broad, vague patent that the courts were stupid enough to uphold.
Unfortunately if you look you'll notice that as the number of frivolous patent lawsuits against Microsoft has gradually increased over the last few years, Microsoft's response has been... to suddenly start filing a whole bunch of patents. Lots of patents. Even more than before. And making a big deal in the press about patents and how important they are. And making a big deal to Europe about why they need software patents. Whereas before software patents was something they didn't really give much public indication of caring about one way or the other.
Microsoft obviously isn't doing this for protection, since the only people who've been suing Microsoft have been tiny parasite IP companies-- the kind of people who a patent shield is useless against. Instead it almost kind of seems to me like Microsoft is brushing off the patent judgments like an elephant swatting flies with its tail, but meanwhile going "wait... you mean patents can be used for evil? Interesting...", as if even though the lawsuits may sting a little they don't mind so much because it's given them some ideas of their own.
I hope to whatever Gods may or may not exist that this is just my overactive paranoid imagination.
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And for comparison, Gates is worth about 40B$ (as of 2003) according to Forbes (and that's a low-end number, from what I've seen elsewhere). In the first quarter of 2004, Microsoft had revenues of 10B$, and had a total market capitalization of around 250B$.
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