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Dell Says Re-Imaging HDs a Burden If Word Banned
N!NJA writes "In an amicus curiae brief filed on Aug. 24, Dell asked the judge overseeing the Eastern District Court of Texas to reconsider its order blocking sales of Word, part of the original ruling in favor of Canadian software developer i4i. In the worst case, the brief argued, the injunction should be delayed by 120 days. 'The District Court's injunction of Microsoft Word will have an impact far beyond Microsoft,' Dell and HP wrote. 'Microsoft Word is ubiquitous among word processing software and is included on [redacted] computers sold by Dell.' 'If Microsoft is required to ship a revised version of Word in Dell's computers, a change would need to be made to Dell's images,' Dell wrote. 'Making such a change would require extensive time- and resource- consuming testing.' An addendum to the brief notes that it was authored in Microsoft Word, part of Office 2003."
"Stock" of course meaning copies of Word already under license, not shares of ownership. >_<
In fact, since the licenses are already sold, Dell can probably keep selling Word through the end of their current contract..
This is an odd issue for the courts, as Microsoft did legitimately cheat I4I out (read the details), but on the flip side software patents are an unnecessary burden.
This "odd issue" is an excellent situation for just about everyone not involved in the case, though.
Firstly, arguably the biggest player in the software business is now on the wrong side of a software patents lawsuit, which is going to mean probably the most powerful legal team in the business is going to be looking for all sorts of arguments to get such patents overturned.
Secondly, there are going to be some hard questions about what constitutes "copying" in the case of software, which the big players have been carefully avoiding answering in court for a very long time, for fear that the already dubious legal basis for their EULAs and reseller-based sales models will be invalidated. Answering those questions definitively cannot help but clarify a lot of the ambiguity surrounding those issues. Does the act of installing a piece of software for which you have already paid constitute making a copy? Does the mere act of running software already installed constitute making a copy? It's going to be very unpleasant for players like Dell and HP if the injunction stands, even for a few weeks, and those things are found to constitute making a copy. But if they're not making a copy for the purposes of this software patent-related case, then logically they can't be affected by copyright either, and EULAs fall apart.
I wouldn't like to predict the outcome here, but I'm guessing some big players in our industry are going to be pretty upset one way or another. And given that consumers (and smaller players in the industry, for that matter) are almost always on the wrong side of status quo, hopefully that means we're all going to be pretty happy one way or another.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You might find the term inconvenient but it is essentially accurate.
While not precisely correct for technical reasons, "convicted monopolist" is entirely accurate.
They were found to have a monopoly and to have abused that monopoly on numerous occasions.
It's a useful shorthand to avoid overly technical jargon that would primarily serve as euphemism.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What I don't get is, last time I was on Dell's site, it let you configure a computer system. The exact same system offering Microsoft Office could be configured with WordPerfect and I think they had an option of no office suite at all. That means they have images with WordPerfect and images with no office suite. So, would it kill them to just use one of the images they already have instead of complaining that they have to make a new one?