Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Loses Appeal in Guatemalan Patent Claim
Spy der Mann writes "A year ago, Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado sued Microsoft for stealing an Office idea he had tried to sell them in '92. They were found to be infringing on his patent and had to pay him $9 million in damages, but they refused and appealed the decision. Today, just a year after they appealed, the Court confirmed the verdict: Microsoft loses. If that wasn't enough, the amount was raised to $65 million for continuing infringement."
My post simply summarized the first claim of the patent. The claims of a patent define the monopolies granted to the applicant. All conditions of a single claim must be fulfilled in order to infringe on that claim. So as soon as you use an if-the-else test in the way described in the first claim, you are infringing.
The abstract and description are merely used to help interpret the claim, but they have little or no legal value and do not directly define what the patent monopoly covers.
Donate free food here
I think the patent is of dubious validity; it's basically a patent on applying a class of welll-known technologies to relational databases instead of in-memory databases. It doesn't contain any significant intellectual insights.
Microsoft got targeted by this patent because they have money. But, in the end, that's good: Microsoft has been such a big proponent of "intellectual property protection" in recent years that they should realize that they have a lot to lose themselves from bogus patent claims, probably more than any of their competitors. Let's hope they'll change their lobbying as a result of such claims.
(Incidentally, this is a US patent case; the only thing Guatemalan about it is the inventor.)
The history of this particular patent was that this guy was able to make Excel and Access work together in 1992. Back then they were two separate programs developed independently at MS and not really designed to interface with each other. He found a way for them to interact together and he patented it. He claims that he showed his method to MS but they didn't want to buy his patent. He claims they then used his technique anyway on subsequent versions of Excel and Access. A court has determined his claims were valid and they were reaffirmed on appeal.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
How many fulltime jobs can one man have?
That is correct. The problem right now is that patents hurt more than they help and therfore the whole idea is generally bad. If the system haven't been misused and foobared it would not have been bad.