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."

Comments

This is excellent, absolutely fantastic news

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.