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Surfcast Sues Microsoft Over Tile Patent

Posted by Unknown on from the smells-like-windows-1.0 dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news of a company suing Microsoft for infringing upon a patent for tiles with live content. From the article: "SurfCast, in a complaint filed yesterday in a U.S. District Court in Maine, said Microsoft infringes one of its four patents — No. 6,724,403 — by 'making, using, selling, and offering to sell devices and software products' covered by SurfCast's patent. That includes mobile devices using the Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 operating systems as well as PCs using Windows 8/RT."

5 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. That's a new level of ugly by jader3rd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I can see why SurfCasts tiles didn't take off. That's beyond ugly. Since Microsoft referenced SurfCasts patent in their patent, I suspect Microsoft determined that they were different enough to not require a licensing deal.
    The Microsoft Live Tiles use data that's been curated for the purpose of a tile. SurfCasts is making little windows onto programs that have no idea their being ran in a little window.

  2. Re:Not a troll by JDG1980 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A tile is just a chromeless application window. What's novel about it?

  3. Re:Not a troll by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It seems to be the same thing and it's a novel way of doing things.

    Exactly, it's not like it is similar to an airplane dashboard, right? And did anyone notice the timing? Coinciding a lawsuit with an OS release, that's not suspicious at all, tsk tsk tsk...

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  4. Re:Its not like people havent sued MS b4 by aristotle-dude · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And lost :)

    For the look and feel suit but not the one for stolen source code from Quicktime which ended up in Video for Windows. The latter resulted in an out of court settlement where MSFT bought non-voting shares in Apple, made undisclosed payments rumored to be around a billion in the end and a commitment to continue developing MS Office and Internet Explorer for the mac for 5 years. The MS Office commitment was renewed voluntarily by Microsoft a number of times since then.

    --
    Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
  5. Total TROLLL by PortHaven · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Seriously, go look at these "screenshots" of product. And tell me how their product was anything different than all the horrible 1990's websites built with frames, that continually refreshed.

    Seriously, this shouldn't even go to court....

    http://web.archive.org/web/20070420033547/http://www.surfcast.com/images/bloom.jpg

    http://web.archive.org/web/20070101195114/http://surfcast.com/images/trading.jpg

    http://web.archive.org/web/20070101163517/http://surfcast.com/images/weather.jpg

    http://web.archive.org/web/20070126130038/http://www.surfcast.com/images/word_doc.jpg