Slashdot Mirror
B&N Pummels Microsoft Patent Claims With Prior Art
itwbennett writes "As Slashdot readers will recall, Barnes & Noble is being particularly noisy about the patents Microsoft is leveraging against the Nook. Now the bookseller has filed a supplemental notice of prior art that contains a 43-page list of examples it believes counters Microsoft's claim that Nook violates five of Microsoft's patents. 'The list of prior art for the five patents that Microsoft claims the Nook infringes is very much a walk down memory lane,' says Brian Proffitt. 'The first group of prior art evidence presented by Barnes & Noble for U.S. Patent No. 5,778,372 alone lists 172 pieces of prior art' and 'made reference to a lot of technology and people from the early days of the public Internet... like Mosaic, the NCSA, and (I kid you not) the Arena web browser. The list was like old home week for the early World Wide Web.'"
The problem is that USPTO has been hiring foreign born engineers that come over here, finish a PhD, get their citizenship and then get on with USPTO. They have little knowledge of state of the art, and more importantly, little to none of the PRIOR ART.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's the problem though. Nobody is buying WP7, so an injunction wouldn't hurt them very much and the damages wouldn't be very high.
Of course, if they found some patents that Windows 7 was infringing...