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Alcatel Awarded $367 Million in MS Patent Case
eldavojohn writes "For violating two Alcatel-Lucent patents in its Windows user interface, Microsoft was ordered to pay Alcatel-Lucent $367 Million Friday. From the article, 'Microsoft, which will seek to have the verdict overturned, said Alcatel-Lucent was seeking $1.5 billion in damages related to the four patents named in the case. Microsoft said the jury found that Microsoft did not infringe on Alcatel's video decoding technology patent. The fourth patent in the lawsuit was asserted only against Dell Inc, which was found not to have infringed, according to Microsoft.'"
the sooner we can get rid of patents the better, even if it is ms on the receiving end of the big patent stick it still brings me no joy.
The patent system long ago stopped serving its original purpose and it needs to be abolished or overhauled asap. Software patents ought to be done away with completely.
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This one has a little more info. Does anyone have a link for the actual patents?
And this one goes on to mention that Microsoft will now proceed to sue Alcatel-Lucent over nine patents.
That's going to hurt. Patent lawsuits are not a good game to get into if you actually produce something.
patents were devised as a way to protect inventors and allow them to make a return on their idea's in exchange for releasing that device into the public domain after a reasonible amount of time (similar to copyright).
the problem is that right now -anything- is being considered a bloody invention. maybe some kind of system where all the patents logded once a year get assessed in competition with each other, and only the top 1000 best idea's get patent protection or something. that way there is no incentive to try flood the system with crappy obivous patent ideas.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Since anyone using those patents is now guilty of violation, there is a risk that Alcatel will go after Windows users next. Does *your* organisation have a risk mitigation plan for when the lawsuits start flying? Or will you simply close your eyes and hope that Microsofts "indemnification" is worth more than the pixels it is printed on?
How does that indemnification work anyway? As far as I can tell, any legal proceedings would be between Alcatel and targeted patent violators - i.e. Microsoft has no standing in such cases. Do they offer to pay for any damages and cost incurred? In that case I guess the risk is acceptable after all...
This must mean that Microsoft has started ripping off technology that's less than 20 years out of date. Obviously, there is some progress in Windows-land after all.
It's just a jury verdict. Being a patent case, it will be appealed and probably be heard, so I doubt anything is certain about the verdict.
That said, I think Alcatel-Lucent should be more worried about their current CEO, Patricia Russo. This partial win is about all she can lay claim to besides the 45% slide in ALU's stock and the 70% slide in Lucent's stock prior to the merger. She'll need a couple more of these to make up for her Fiorina-esque management of the company. (To be fair, she's not the sociopathic power monger that Fiorina was. She's just as inept at management.)
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Unless you a a patent lawyer. They always win if billed by the hour
The arguments for and against software patents are old and boring, so I wrote a devil's advocate defense of software patents a few months back.
In fact most of the arguments for software patents are based on 150-year old arguments that protection from competition is the best way to push innovation.
The arguments were bogus in 1820 and they are bogus today.
Innovation does not need protection from competition, it needs as much competition as possible, in the most free market possible.
Kill software patents!
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No, bash patent trolls! Microsoft! Critical mass reached, initiating chain-reaction mass head explosion!
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I really hate microsoft but not nearly as much as patent trolls and our messed up patent system where people can get such insanely broad patents. these are abusing the original purpose of patents which was to foster innovation and not to just give people a blank check to sue anyone. Most of these patents have no novelty and they are RIDICULOUS. They are sapping away money from american companies and cause companies to pay huge amounts of legal fees. The patent office gives out tech patents to any joe schmo and does no have the ability to check for novelty. They do not adequately validate the non-existence of prior art. This is just wrong and it shows a weakness in the system of RND were companies invest a lot of money to create an invention and get rewarded for it not just to see some new technology in its infancy on the internet and to go ahead and legally patent a work created by a community of developers as a whole. Once they have this patent they can even sue the original developers and make them pay for using there own invention. It simply doesn't makes sense to me and why hasn't the american government done anything to stop these money leeching abusers.
''User interfaces'' are similar across desktops on the major operating systems MS/Mac/Linux, so if MS infringes then Mac/Linux ones are potential targets.
With m$ being sued for simply making products that infringe on patents filed just so Alcatel could sue, did Alcetel (and every other patent troll) just make a new enemy? A very powerful, trillion dollar enemy?
You are aware, that this is valid only for the US patent system? The US patent system is different (and IMHO worse) than all other patent systems in many ways, like 'first to file'
The US is first to invent not first to file. This is about the only thing that's better about the US system, however there's a movement afoot to harmonize US patent law to other countries' laws.
FalconShould there be a Law?
n the drugs industry, a poster child for pro-patent arguments, a fixed-term monopoly could be granted by the licensing authority as a quid-pro-quo for getting a new drug proven and certified
Except patents aren't needed for drugs. "An alternative to pharmaceutical patents". As for funding research, pharmaceutical companies spend much more money on marketing than research and development. Then not all research on drugs is done by pharmaceutical companies either. An excellent example is Taxol, a drug for the treatment of some cancers such as breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute, NCI, spent $183,000,000 developing and testing Taxol. After the NCI spent all that taxpayer money it sold all the rights, including the test data needed to get FDA drug approval to Bristol-Myers Squibb for $43,000,000, $140,000,000 less than taxpayers paid. By 2000, years after BMS bought the rights, it was estimated BMS was making $1,000,000,000 a year on sales of Taxol.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The pharmaceutical industry is probably the best example I can think of for the requirement of patents.
See my post on drug patents on why they aren't needed.
FalconShould there be a Law?
How about this:
Patents should only be granted if the party requesting a patent can successfully argue that the patent is necessary for the products they propose to sell to pay back all R&D costs plus, say, 5% ROI.
For example, drug patents are widely seen as useful to encourage drug R&D, on an individual basis. A blanket consideration of pharmaceuticals could be arrived at fairly quickly.
But software is regularly able to provide a good ROI with only copyright to protect it.
Eventually, a body of law and regulations based on these arguments would decide what can be patented, and what cannot. It should evolve over time since need for temporary monopolies can be expected to change over time.
From a related article:
Microsoft said the two patents it was found to have infringed upon related to technology that allows users to enter dates into calendars and another used in tablet computers to recognize patterns in handwriting.
Wow...How in God's name is 'entering dates into a calendar' or anything to do with the 5 people who actually use Tablet handwriting recognition worth 367$ million?
I mean, so you infringed...fine. Can happen innocently or not. Even if you determine it wasn't innocent, say make it triple damages. How do you come close to $367 million with 'entering dates into a calendar' or handwriting recognition. If more than 1 million tablets have sold, I would be surprised...if you valued the handwriting piece at even a huge portion of the cost of the OS, say 1%, that's still only $1mm in real damages ( with magic numbers of say $100 for OS, 1 million units, and 1% of the functionality).
I mean on the one hand, I think being able to sue a bad actor into non-existence... not bankruptcy, out of the game entirely... is an effective tool to deal with the most egregious violators (life and limb shit, not 'usability enhancements'), I can see how litigation really needs to be reigned in over crap like this.
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