Microsoft Ordered To Pay $388 Million In Patent Case

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday April 8, 2009 @08:13PM from the pay-up dept.

jeffmeden writes "BusinessWeek reports today that Microsoft suffered a loss in federal court Monday. The judge rendering the verdict ordered Microsoft to pay $388 Million in damages for violating a patent held by Uniloc, a California maker of software that prevents people from illegally installing software on multiple computers. Uniloc claims Microsoft's Windows XP and some Office programs infringe on a related patent they hold. It's hard to take sides on this one, but one thing is certain: should the verdict hold up, it will be heavily ironic if the extra copies of XP and Office sold due to crafty copy protection end up not being worth $388 million."

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Re:TFA is lacking info... by Alain+Williams · 2009-04-08 20:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

That is not the point. It would be if this was about copyright, with a patent you can infringe it if you never heard of it, your programmers came up with the idea and coded it -- it just needs for someone to have submitted a patent application before the idea was published somewhere.
This is why software patents are dreadful -- it simply rewards the guy who filed the patent application first. This is especially true with patents about simple ideas or those that are obvious to someone asked to solve a particular problem -- most software patents fall into this group.