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'?"

Comments

Re:never search

[whoever57]

The reason you never want to search, is that you could find prior art

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.

Irony

[doconnor]

Ironically, the original purpose of patent was to get them published to help others learn new techniques and ideas and expand on them.

How Pointless is That?

[ewhac]

The legal claims section--the only section that counts--was indecipherable by anyone but a patent attorney.

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

Learned from Stacker

[EditDistance]

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?

Re:Learned from Stacker

[PitaBred]

Because we're engineers and just want to get things done. Everyone else is much more worried about how to make money off of our work, and how to lock it up so that no one else can use it.