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Microsoft, Autodesk Guilty of Patent Infringement
rfunches writes "A Texas jury has awarded $133 million in damages to David Colvin, after finding Microsoft and Autodesk guilty of infringing upon Colvin's two software patents for software antipiracy protection. Colvin's company, z4 Technologies Inc., filed patents for 'passwords and codes assigned to individual software copies to prevent unauthorized copies.' Microsoft was ordered to pay $115 million, and Autodesk $18 million for infringement of the product-activation schemes. A spokesman from Microsoft contends that 'Microsoft developed its own product-activation technologies well before z4 Technologies filed for its patent.' Appeals are expected."
As always, the key to a patent is its specificity. The first patent says
1) We send you the software and a product key.
2) You register that product with that key
3) We send you a second password for that product
4) You use the second password indefinitely
This sounds just like SGI's key-o-matic. If you buy one of their "licensed" products, you get CDs and an entitlement ID. Send a properly formatted email with the entitlement ID and the system IDs (essentially the ethernet adress of the workstation) to key-o-matic@sgi.com or was that liceses@ ?) and get license passwords back (that's what the license manager software actually calls them) that are locked to those systems back by email. Keyomatic is at least 10 years old, if one is to believe this usenet post.