MS vs AT&T Case Stirs Software Patent Debate

Stormwave0 writes "A Microsoft appeal against a decision for AT&T and their speech recognition patent has reached the Supreme Court. AT&T has argued that they did not license software using the patent for sales overseas. Microsoft, in the original case, argued "that it wasn't really liable for infringing on AT&T's licensing rights because it only supplied the golden disk to the replicator one time, and that disk did not really contain software in a usable form anyway." With that argument rejected, the case has moved in an unexpected direction. The court is now debating whether or not software is actually patentable."

Comments

Re:One lawyer for sure out of job, more might foll

[TheRaven64]

Microsoft lost around a billion dollars to patent trolls last year. How much did they make by licensing software patents (or indirectly by looking as if they might)?

Re:One lawyer for sure out of job, more might foll

[squiggleslash]

There have been successful patent suits against Microsoft, notably the recent ActiveX one, and they're always extremely disruptive.

If I were Ballmer, no matter how much I may dislike competition from Free Software and see patents as a potential battering ram against it (and they're of limited utility against FS anyway), I would see the sheer disruption and difficulty innovating that patents bring as overwhelmingly being the major issue.

If patents worked against Free Software, it would have died a long time ago. The distributed nature of the software's developers, the number of groups that maintain it in countries immune from software patent laws, the interoperability demanded by Microsoft's own customers that patents undermine, make it a poor weapon, usable mostly for FUD and little else.