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ZTE Joins Long List of Android Device-Makers Licensing Microsoft Patents
An anonymous reader writes "In its continuing march toward locking up deals with every major Android and Chrome device maker, Microsoft announced on Tuesday a patent-licensing agreement with Chinese manufacturer ZTE. This follows a similar deal last week with the parent company of Foxconn. Microsoft's Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez said, 'Much of the current litigation in the so called 'smartphone patent wars' could be avoided if companies were willing to recognize the value of others’ creations in a way that is fair. At Microsoft, experience has taught us that respect for intellectual property rights is a two-way street, and we have always been prepared to respect the rights of others just as we seek respect for our rights. This is why we have paid others more than $4 billion over the last decade to secure intellectual property rights for the products we provide our customers.'"
Rent seeking is the new innovation at Microsoft.
Someone needs to stand up to these folks. Let's see these patents tossed out.
"Look, you can licence our patents, or we can sue you. It really doesn't matter if you're using our patents or not, well tie you up in court for YEARS. Your choice..."
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Is the list of patents being licensed available or is this just more bullshit, like when they claimed Linux violated their patents and refused to say which ones?
The specific patent is for creating 8.3 file names from long file names. Linux works around it by simply not creating 8.3 file names, which seems to be more or less compatible with Windows which is presumably the goal here too.
Those patents will expire soon. Maybe ZTE figured it would be easier to just wait them out and pay a little bit than it would be to fight them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
For anyone curious, these are the 4 patents that Microsoft has been wielding like a club. Note: I've shortened it to list the basic claims below. Microsoft claims are repetitive legalize and go on and on repeating the same drivel over and over. Notice they are saying that they hold sole claim to the concepts of scheduling meetings, sending and receiving messages on a cellular network, storing file names in a file system, and pressing buttons. It would be laughable if they weren't successfully litigating the crap out of the entire Android industry. It's the dying screams of a company that no longer matters that has stopped innovating and wants someone else's success for themselves. Very sad and pathetic really. The truth is they could sue Apple, IBM or anyone else that even manufactures PCs out of existence with these patents if they wanted, they're so broad and there's so much prior art it's not even funny. The fact that they courts are upholding them is scary.
U.S. Patent No. 6,370,566 on "generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device" On May 18, 2012, the ITC ordered a U.S. import ban against Motorola's Android-based devices that infringe this Microsoft patent.
Claims: The present invention includes a mobile device which provides the user with the ability to schedule a meeting request from the mobile device itself. The mobile device creates an object representative of the meeting request and assigns the object a global identification number which uniquely identifies the object to other devices which encounter the object. In this way, other devices which encounter the meeting request are capable of identifying it as a unique meeting request in order to alleviate the problem of duplicate meeting request transmissions. In accordance with another preferred feature of the present invention, an electronic mail application or calendar application on the mobile device obtains a fully qualified electronic mail address for the potential attendees from an abridged address book or directory stored on the mobile device itself. This alleviates problems associated with the storage capacity of the mobile device. In accordance with another preferred embodiment of the present invention, the mobile device creates the meeting object and the electronic mail meeting request object using a set of properties which are supported by a plurality of PIMs that may receive the objects. This provides compatibility with an increased number of devices which are likely to encounter the objects. In accordance with yet another preferred feature of the present invention, localizers implement a plurality of templates on the mobile device which are used in formatting the properties of the objects associated with the meeting request. A data stream representative of the meeting request is parsed by the mobile device and placed in pre-defined fields in the appropriate templates so that the text viewed by the user of the mobile device more closely conforms to local convention. In addition, time zone information is also included in one embodiment.
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EP1304891 on "communicating multi-part messages between cellular devices using a standardized interface" On May 24, 2012, the Munich I Regional Court granted Microsoft an injunction over this patent against Motorola's Android-based devices. This was the first Microsoft v. Google decision ever. It came down only days after Google completed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility. The ruling is already being enforced in Germany.
Claims: A method for facilitating an application sending multiple short messages fragments, the method for use in a cellular network that facilitates the transmission of messages between cellular computing devices, the messages being multi-part messages that consist of multiple short message fragments of limited size: [either compressed, encrypted or wrapped in XML.]
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EP0618540 on a "common name space for long and short filenames" On July 27, the Mannheim Regional Court granted Microsoft a German patent injunction against Go
I could debate this but choose not to. I disagree that patents and copyrights are immoral, I think they have their place but the problem is that greed has twisted and perverted the original purpose of these systems. I do believe that software patents are wrong as copyright should be sufficient protection for software.