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Visto Founder Blogs about Microsoft Lawsuit

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the horse's-mouth dept.

neelm writes "Reported a few days ago, Visto is suing Microsoft over patent infringements. David Cowen, a founder of Visto (and Verisign) has made a recent blog post about the patent involved. He clears up what exactly the patents involved are, but what may be a more interesting read is the patent itself - issued in March of 2004. It might be nice to see Microsoft defending itself from patent litigation I admit, but I'm not sure I want to give validity to this patent."

2 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. They took our problem and made it their own! by Rahga · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the blog post:
    "These PC's were running on the same large TCP/IP network as my PC client at Bessemer as well our Exchange server, and yet there was no way for me to access my corporate email and calendar."

    "These patents were written by programmers who were engaged in building a viable, commercial platform, and genuinely wished to protect the invention."

    Here's the deal... He wants to fix a problem, bridge a gap. On obvious gap. The patent system is supposed to protect inventions, not prevent people from creating their own solutions to a problem. I see nothing in that stupid patent that isn't nebulous and pathetic.

    "But this time Microsoft is steamrolling its way into wireless messaging through the clear theft of my, Daniel's, Chris', and others' intellectual property. That's why Visto is suing."

    Pray, tell, what exactly did Microsoft steal? Did they steal your problem space? Because patents don't cover problems. They cover solutions.

  2. rsync? by burnin1965 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So this guy patented rsync?

    Andrew Tridgell has copyrights on rsync as old as 1996, possibly even older.

    This patent never should have passed the Novel or Obviousness tests. I find it amazing reading some of these patents that have been issued and finding that the patent itself explains why it should not be patentable. From the uspto.gov website:

    "The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention."

    Now I'll get a long list of replies with "if it was obvious how come nobody did it before". All I can tell you is that just because somebody hasn't done it doesn't mean its not obvious.

    Let me explain it this way, if you have a problem that needs to be solved by developing a software application and you can sit down with a developer and he says "yeah, I can do that" then its obvious. If the developer says "thats impossible" and somebody then spends significant time and resources trying to find a solution and does, they very well may have something that is patentable.

    That said I would also point out that in 99.999% of all cases software algorithms and solutions are not patentable, they should be covered by copyright. And copyright covers the actual code a binaries, not reverse engineering. If somebody does the same thing with their own code it is not a copyright violation.

    burnin