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Microsoft Is Sued For Patent Violation Over .NET
randomErr writes "As reported by Info World, Microsoft was issued a cease and desist order on February 7 of this year by Vertical Computer Systems. The order was for patent infringement by the current implementations of the .NET framework. Both the .NET framework and Vertical Computer Systems' SiteFlash use XML to create component-based structures that are used to build and operate web sites. Vertical Computer Systems is requesting a full jury trial. If VCS prevails, .NET technology implementations as we know them may completely change and Microsoft would probably have to pay out a hefty sum."
The patent issue in the US is going/gone from bad to worse. The retrieval form is bloody tough for any regular developer to sit and verify whether or not what he just developed is actually patent free or not! For all we know, there are a ton of ideas, not limited to computers alone, that have been developed by some really smart people who don't know whether or not their idea falls under some patent statement, fearing which, the inventor hasn't brought his creation under the public eye!
Does anyone know if Mono is affected by this?
One problem is that patents are filed and granted for "inventions" that has too low technical merits. By raising the standard requirements for patents this may help things a bit. One problem is also that the patent offices gets their revenue from the patents, and that doesn't help a bit. Instead that causes the patent offices to grant patents based on the fact that they get the money from it!
In today's world with software development it's a complete minefield to have patents on software. In the end it will limit the functionality of the software we use and require us to pay more for less.
When it comes to copyright, the issue is a bit more complicated. Movies and music has a rather long market lifetime, so a decades issue shouldn't be a problem here. When it comes to computer software the issue is different. In my opinion the copyright should be rendered invalid for commercial software packages whenever support for it is terminated. (Think MS-DOS, CP/M etc.) Even on movies and music there should be a "bail-out" option that allows for the copyright to be released. E.g. when the copyright holder no longer can be located with reasonable efforts.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Funny how we in the free world survives without these patents. They have no merit for the consumer, they serve only the interest of corporations who exist solely to litigate and gain their earnings from suing other companies.
Kodak won $1 billion from Sun for (spurious?) patent violations in Java. I would not be surprised to see MS lose this fight.
And considering how similar C# and Java are, I'm surprised Kodak isn't alleging the same patent violation.
I suppose they could threaten them with a batch of their own patents, say something like "mouse click", "graphical interface", ...
Tuntematon Muukalainen
Getting sued over patent infringement is no reason to go patenting things yourself: you can still be sued for infringement anyway. And I doubt Vertical Computer Systems will be interested in a patent cross-license agreement (and they are monopolistic anyway).
Microsoft patents a lot because they hope to be able to kill open source competition with it--open source competition they have not been able to outcompete otherwise and where their usual monopolistic tricks have failed as well.
Vertical's patent is, of course, bogus. But I do like Microsoft getting hit by these kinds of lawsuits; maybe sooner or later they'll see that software patents aren't the way out for them.
(There's a slight problem here in that most people aren't sensible.)
As another ex-examiner I agree with the points you have made. I took a quick look at the prosecution of this application. There were three non-final rejections made before the application was allowed. The examiner spent a good deal of time in laying out rejections under 35 USC 102 (anticipation) and 35 USC 103 (obviousness), using a two column format with the claim limitations in the left column and relevant sections from the prior art in the right column. The applicant made essentially no substantive changes to the claims and just asserted that examiner didn't show what was asserted. I think the examiner made a big mistake in the second and third rejections of failing to respond to the arguments made by the applicant in the amendments; this was noted by the attorney in the last amendment after which the application was allowed.
There are three things one must keep in mind in figuring out exactly what is covered by a patent. Fundamentally it is the claims that measure the invention, not the title or abstract, or random pieces of the specification. However, the language and terms in the specification must be interpreted in light of the description given in the specification. So, if a term in a claim is an "object library", for example, it wpould be interpreted as this term is discussed in the description. Finally, and relevant to the failing pointed out in the previous paragraph, the scope of the claims is further qualified by the back and forth of the comments and arguments made by the examiner and the applicant. If the applicant tries to avoid a rejection by arguing that a prior art reference feature is not covered by some limitation in the claim the applicant will be bound to this interpretation in any infringement action should a patent be issued. One of the purposes of making rejections, even if it might not be spot on a limitation is to flush out and clarify such possible ambiguities. This is particularly applicable here where an examiner decides to allow a claim previously rejected with no further limitation added. If an applicant is going to squeeze through a narrow "hole" in the prior art not coverable by an obviousness rejection it is important to make sure it is as narrow as possible. By failing to engage the attorney's arguments in the following rejections here the examiner weakened this aspect of prosecution. Instead it looks pretty much like set arguments back and forth, with the examiner essentially saying "OK, I give up, you win" with no further comment.
Fianlly, I see that a continuation has been filed, but, so far, has been stripped to just claim 1 of the issued patent (with one misspelling). There will clearly be a preliminary amendment filed with claims applicant wants to prosecute, but have no idea what this might be.
When you figure that Microsoft will be attempting to find prior art to invalidate the patent. If they fail, they will be hosed, if they succeed then the concept is something that they will be unable to patent and therefore will be available to the open-source community.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Now Microsoft need software patents to stop Linux from beating them (or at least think they do, which comes to pretty much the same thing). I think they figure they can handle the occasional patent lawsuit from the few companies that are rich (and brave) enough to take them on and don't have any products that are at risk from a counter-suit.
If software patents are evil, then we shouldn't be rooting for Microsoft to win the case. We should be hoping they lose and it makes them start pushing for reform of the system.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Armchair strategists in the Free Software community have been concerned about Mono and patents from day one, but the reality is that Mono is probably the safest technology on the planet. The reason behind this is simple. If you were going to sue someone over patent infringement would you rather sue Microsoft with its billions of dollars in the bank and millions of customers that rely on every misfeature in its product, or would you rather sue the Mono project which has less money than your average chess club and would happily remove features rather than risk going to court.
The answer is so obvious that it is laughable. If you had a patent that both Mono and .NET used you would almost certainly go after Microsoft. That means that the only company that is likely to sue Mono over patents is Microsoft itself. Even Microsoft knows that if it started suing developers that it would be committing suicide. Ballmer was right when he pointed out that the game is all about developers, and only the stupidest of developers would use Microsoft's technologies for new projects if Microsoft starting suing groups that created technologies that integrated with its development stack. At a certain level everyone that programs is in competition with Microsoft. If Microsoft started throwing its patent weight around developers would flee to other stacks in a hurry.
So what does this mean for Mono? It means that, in this particular case hiding in Microsoft's big shadow is probably the safest place to be. The patent trolls will go after Microsoft and if it turns out that the patent troll actually wins then Mono can always remove the functionality in question long before they face a similar suit. Not that a company that takes a large bite out of Microsoft is going to want to waste money and time trying to shake down a Free Software project.
In the meantime Microsoft will continue to talk big words about Linux and problems with "intellectual property" and the money that is supposedly owed them by Linux users. Ironically this will likely help the patent trolls, like this particular company, in their quest to extract some of Microsoft's money, as it will make it very hard for Microsoft to argue against expensive damages in the case that they lose. After all, Microsoft's own executives have commented any number of times about the need to maintain proper patent licenses.