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Microsoft's Internal Advice About Patents
BigPoppaT writes "Eric Brechner writes a best practices blog called Hard Code for Microsoft under the name I.M. Wright. His most recent post sounds like an endorsement of open source development (and does end with a call for Microsoft developers to participate in the shared source community). But even better is his advice regarding patents: 'When using existing libraries, services, tools, and methods from outside Microsoft, we must be respectful of licenses, copyrights, and patents. Generally, you want to carefully research licenses and copyrights (your contact in Legal and Corporate Affairs can help), and never search, view, or speculate about patents. I was confused by this guidance till I wrote and reviewed one of my own patents. The legal claims section--the only section that counts--was indecipherable by anyone but a patent attorney. Ignorance is bliss and strongly recommended when it comes to patents.' Interesting advice from inside Microsoft. I wonder if Ballmer would agree that ignorance should be 'strongly recommended when it comes to patents'?"
The author is talking about using other peoples' code, which may be copyrighted. They are recommending that the developers should investigate IF the open source tool is protected, and if so that they should respect those limitations. But if they do not know if there are patents on the technology, they should contact the legal department, because the majority of USPTO listings are written like crap with legalise, jargon, and intentional vagueness written in.
What they are trying to prevent is some developer who finds some OS tool online, checks the USPTO database for any claims, and not finding anything obvious, uses the tool with out any concern for the IP owner.
I'm all for flaming MS when they f'up, but this sure seems like good advice. When followed, it protects MS from lawsuits and IP holders from being infringed upon.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
True, but you also might find a patent that an existing product might violate. That could put your company in the position of having to pay triple damages for willful infringement.
This aspect of patent law shows how broken the system is. The concept of a patent is publication in exchange for a limited monopoly. If no-one can actually read the patent (because of the willful infringement problem), then publication is really a myth.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The article wasn't that close to the summary, guess I should expect that here. I don't see any endorsement of anything open source at all. Codeplex is devoid of any meaningful opensource programs. The patent subject is only briefly tocuhced upon as a warning when using third party stuff. Its mostly a indictment of the Microsoft NIH culture. Which I had always suspected. Their experience is rarely a seamlessly integrated one. But mostly it just game me new reasons why I don't want to work for Microsoft.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Ironically, the original purpose of patent was to get them published to help others learn new techniques and ideas and expand on them.
Then it shouldn't be a valid patent. Further evidence that the patent system in the US needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch.
Patents are ensconced in the Constitution, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." Even after a patent expires, it is supposed to contribute to humanity's corpus of knowledge and science. How does a patent, written in language that can't be understood by an actual person trying to actually get something useful done, serve to promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Maybe this is different in Pharma compared to the software industry but in Pharma we most definitely have an obligation establish freedom to patent (i.e., make sure the molecule we are patenting hasn't already been patented). In our case this is done via a series of searches in both text format and via chemical substructure searches of the patent literature.
The current standard is "best effort" which is generally interpreted as searching across all the databases your company subscribes to (chemical patent DBs are EXPENSIVE) using a information science expert for the searching and a PhD chemist to establish the relevance of the search results.
Maybe this is unique to Pharma, but we'd never get a patent granted without a prior art search.
(Not a patent attorney, but I lead the Information Science group at my company which does the searches with them)
Microsoft paid Stac Electronics triple damages for willful infringement in the Stacker case.
Unwinding with some Microsofties at a conference, one of the folk claimed to be fairly close to the technical end of it and said: "we thought we were okay because the patent was very specific about the data structures and the algorithms applied to them. We didn't replicate the data structures at all because there better alternatives. The court didn't care". (Actually Microsoft's will-we-won't-we license it dance was pretty despicable, got a deserved kicking IMHO).
The advice Microsoft is giving here is pretty standard in large engineering companies. Yes, this behavior means patents are largely a self-serving scheme that gives employees a small bonus and makes jobs for corporate legal departments. Yaboo, patents suck...
To compound my cynical view of patents, I recently discovered a colleague had been granted a patent in an area I'd been working on independently and I could not make head nor tail of it because of the lawyer translation process. I went and spoke with my colleague and we had no problem having a technical discussion about the problem and our not so different approaches. Why, why, why, do we put up with the pretense?
I don't know, maybe, but complex laws combined with the often ambiguous circumstances of everyday life are also good reasons to NEVER talk to the police or answer their questions. Talking to the police before you talk to your attorney can NEVER do you any good when and if the case goes to trial and if they are going to charge you and arrest you then NOTHING that you can say is going to change their minds about it. Remember the words of Cardinal Richelieu, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
ignorance of the law is no defense.
They're probably better at reading code than the programmers are at reading patent claims.
Who does best; programmers operating a dictionary, or lawyers operating a computer? :P
Closed source + Patents = Oxymoron
Open source + Patents = Intellectual Property
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga