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Microsoft To Pay $200M In Patent Dispute
Pickens writes "eWeek reports that Microsoft has announced it will pay $200 million to settle a patent-infringement suit against it by VirnetX, which alleged that the software giant infringed on its patents related to communications, virtualization and collaboration technology. This payment represents a substantial markup from the $105.7 million that a Texas jury awarded in March when it found that Microsoft had infringed on two US patents held by VirnetX. Microsoft will license VirnetX technology for its own products. 'We believe that this successful resolution of our litigation with Microsoft will allow us to focus on the upcoming pilot system that will showcase VirnetX's automatic Virtual Private Network technology,' says Kendall Larsen, VirnetX Holding Corp.'s CEO. East Texas courts have a reputation as a good place to pursue intellectual property suits against larger corporations. While many of these cases seem to be settled out of court — or dismissed as totally frivolous — recent lawsuits such as those leveled by i4i and VirnetX are notable for at least extending to the Big Judgment phase."
Even if they have to pay out a few hundred million here and there, I'm sure they make a lot more money
because of the barriers these patents cause to their opponents.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
They patent everything because the system requires them to. You should blame the whole patent system instead.
It may be worth nothing that 200M is not *in addition to* the 100M from an earlier lawsuit: From TFA: "In a joint statement Monday, VirnetX and Microsoft announced that both lawsuits would be dismissed as part of the $200 million settlement. Microsoft will also license the VirnetX patents, the companies said." The summary doesn't seem intentionally misleading, but I did not gather this to be the case.
My other sig is clever.
Yeah, because we all will go buy our things from patent trolls...
Look at the VirnetX website and look at the products http://www.virnetx.com/products.php it has very little other than patent licensing! While they do have a few real products, VirnetX is more or less a patent troll.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Keeping a technology as a trade secret doesn't make you immune to patent litigation. This is why many companies have a defensive patent portfolio.
What they are doing is creating a weapon. They won't go after Red Hat directly, so they will loose a bunch of lawsuits against patent trolls, and let the trolls try to go after Red Hat in hope that Red Hat won't survive the multiple lawsuits. Then they will have convince the word that Linux is fragile because stupid software patents.
I've always loved how at the end of a patent dispute, the company who's lost to the patent holder, agrees "to license the 'technology'. After the money is paid out, I wonder if there's really anything that gets passed back... Code samples? Flowcharts? Theory of operations? Punch cards? I would guess in most cases zip gets transferred - and not the compression algorithm...
Company1 - "Yeah, hi, this is Bob at company X - we recently licensed your technology that allows people to use a mouse to interact with a computation unit in a way that allows the computation unit to perform a useful task. We'd like to get the relevant documentation?"
Company2 - "Um, docs. Huh - never thought of that - I mean it's never come up... Wow, I guess you could read the patent application - that's the only docs we got. BTW, would you like to purchase rights to allow the mouse to instruct the computation unit to perform a useless task? We got a special going on this week for that..."
Let's blame the people who lobbied for it too, like the ones who work for Microsoft. Let's also blame the groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that push US-style patent laws on third-world countries in exchange for medicine.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Microsoft so far are one of the few companies that don't patent troll. They tend to use their portfolio as defensive patents.
Bullshit. Microsoft of course uses their patent portfolio offensively. The reason you don't see these things go to court is because they are so good at it. They have patent cross-license agreements with all the big players, and none of the little players have the resources to fight them. Microsoft has a huge patent portfolio.
If Microsoft wants money from you, they can come with a huge stack of patents and an army of lawyers and say: "Look, we think you violate this patent, but if you think you don't, here are another two dozen you probably violate. And these are the dozen lawyers that are going to tie your company and your employees up in knots for the next ten years with depositions and court dates, keep you from shipping your products, and give you bad press. Now, for just 5% of your revenue, you can save yourself all this trouble. Do the math: even if you eventually win it's cheaper. Any questions?"
The only people moderately immune from this are open source developers, because they can basically tell Microsoft to put their cards on the table or go f*ck themselves.
For someone who's been around as long as you have, you sure are ignorant. Microsoft has indeed sued other companies for patents. It was covered quite a bit on Slashdot at the time. Don't go spreading the misinformation that Microsoft is a benign patent owner.
Qxe4