Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Increases Android Patent Licensing Reach
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft may not be winning in the mobile arena, but they're still making tons of money from those who are. Patent licensing agreements net the company billions each year from device makers like Samsung, Foxconn, and ZTE. Now, Microsoft has added another company to that list: Qisda Corp. They make a number of Android and Chrome-based devices under the Qisda brand and the BenQ brand, and now Microsoft will be making money off those, too.
it's never enough ... complete global corporate corruption is here
What are the actual MS patents for which these Android companies are paying royalties? TFS and every one of TFAs don't say, don't even hint.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I tried to make a more readable version of similar data on this wiki page:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Micro...
Help appreciated.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
This is getting pretty weird. Windows Phone is now free, right? So if a phone maker builds WinPhones, do they pay Microsoft nothing for the same patents? Is that legal - to charge a patent royalty to device makers using somebody else's software - using no Microsoft code, while allowing makers of devices using Microsoft software to pay no software or patent fees?
Microsoft may not have a monopoly on mobile, but the patents in question are surely based on their desktop monopoly. For instance, FAT32. No device maker uses FAT32 because it's a good file system. They use it because of the Microsoft desktop monopoly. So to charge Android device makers a patent royalty on essentially the ability to be compatible with Windows desktops - while letting WinPhone device makers ride free - amounts to illegal tying of WinPhone to their Windows monopoly position, no?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
...and yet the EU goes after Google for supposedly anti-competitive behavior for Android, which they provide for free. Along with Google apps and services. Or without them. Yes, there's some grey area where an OEM has to be all Google or all AOSP. And maybe that should be disallowed. But surely, charging OEM's to use your competitor's software and not charging them to use yours is a bigger violation, no?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
For instance, FAT32. No device maker uses FAT32 because it's a good file system. They use it because of the Microsoft desktop monopoly.
Actually I think that's an incorrect observation. Everyone is using FAT32 because everyone is using FAT32. Much the same reason every uses certain screw drivers, because all the screws are that shape.
Usually, I dislike MSFT and the USPTO.
But I have to credit Microsoft with spending cold hard cash on research, for several years. We need more companies to invest in long-term research. Companies like HP who lay off their R&D staff for a quick buck deserve to go under.
The FAT32 example might be an anti-trust violation. Most of the other stuff probably has nothing to do with Windows desktop OS however. Remember Microsoft was a big player in phones for many years until Apple / Android.
If anything points out that software patents should be completely thrown out it's this kind of nonsense. The computer world used to joke about the "Microsoft tax" on new computers due to the cost of Windows. This is, literally, a Microsoft tax on Android devices. At least with Windows you got something, this is money for nothing. This is not what the patent system was designed to do.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So Microsoft bullies in the courtroom.
Well, not only this: their attempts at making motherboards Window-only bootable is also a despicable maneuver.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Microsoft contributes something (its patents - so others can use them and make money)
Scenario A: Google back when they initially developed Android ran into a design roadblock. They saw no way to solve the particular problem until one of the developers read a MS patent that solved their issue. MS is therefore paid royalties on their patent.
Scenario B: Google developed Android without ever having heard of any MS patents. Once Android became popular MS lawyers studied their patents trying to stretch them enough to find infringement. They bully the Android phone makers into paying billions. In this scenario Android would have been exactly the same product without the MS patents and MS is being paid billions for nothing.
Scenario A is what the patent system was supposed to be. Scenario B is reality most of the time today. Question is if the few cases of Scenario A justifies all the Scenario B's.
This is getting pretty weird. Windows Phone is now free, right? So if a phone maker builds WinPhones, do they pay Microsoft nothing for the same patents? Is that legal - to charge a patent royalty to device makers using somebody else's software - using no Microsoft code, while allowing makers of devices using Microsoft software to pay no software or patent fees?
Why would it not be legal - you can offer whatever licensing terms you like both on your own patents and on your own software.
What's funny is when Microsoft started out they would make software to run on as many platforms as possible because at the time there were a bunch of proprietary hardware and software platforms in competition with one another. Now Microsoft is trying go the way of the old companies like Commondore, IBM, Macintosh or any other Hardware/software manufacture of the home PC wars back in the 70's and 80's. Proprietary software running on proprietary hardware with zero compatibility between the competing platforms. Microsoft is becoming the very thing they helped kill off.
Microsoft does no work, provides zero value, and yet rakes it in off other companies who labor and provide value.
The patent system is working as intended.
The competition didn't bother because the law says that you have to pay royalties even if you came up with the idea independently.
Just a quibble: IIRC, FAT32 is not covered by any patents at all. It's the "exFAT" filesystem which is patent-protected. FAT32 stopped being useful when portable flash cards passed (IIRC) 2 or 4GB in capacity. exFAT does a somewhat better job with large devices like this, but still, you're right, the only reason people use it is because it's ubiquitous and everything supports it, most importantly Windows, not because it's a great filesystem. So yeah, you could argue that this is illegal leveraging of their desktop monopoly. Too bad no one wants to spend the $$$ to challenge them in court over this.
Close, but not quite: Microsoft still has the vast majority of desktop OS installations, and they only support their own filesystems.
It's not quite like the screw thing, because there's no single company that dominates screws and screwdrivers. People keep using the same screws because of inertia: everyone's used to flat and phillips screws, and everyone has tools for them, so we keep using them even though they suck. Luckily, more and more stuff is finally moving away from those crappy standards, to Allen (recessed hex), Torx (recessed 6-point star), and Robinson (recessed square). You can get a multi-bit screwdriver and a big set of bits for every kind of screw for less than $10 now.
Also note that Scenario B may be automatic grounds for invalidating the patent, since for it to have happened the patented idea in many cases must have been "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art."
FAT32 is not covered by any patents at all.
Have the patents on VFAT (long file names in FAT16 and FAT32) expired yet?
If you want to claim SD[HX}C support
Keyword: "if". No device maker is forced to include an SD card slot. They could go with a USB port or CF slot instead and use UDF.
You realize that NTFS replaced FAT over a decade ago, right?
Not on removable media.
a Droid vendor can use EXT, port it to Windows and Mac, and ship drivers with their product
But how would the device make Ext drivers available to the computer to which it is connected without 1. presenting a patented file system on which the driver installer is stored and 2. waiting for an administrator to be present to authorize the installation?
Unless you mean Rare as in the trade name of a Twycross-based video game developer that Microsoft acquired, I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that software patents are so uncommon. See All businesses have software patent risk.
Microsoft did the research and built the tech, anyone who doesn't want to pay royalties is free to fund their own R&D and develop their own technology.
Unlike copyrights, patents disregard provenance. This means that even someone who does fund his own research and development could end up independently reaching the same solutions* that Microsoft engineers reached. This would run the risk of having production shut down by Microsoft's legal department.
Again, vendors are free to develop their own technology, nothing stops them
One thing that stops them is the exclusive license granted by national radio regulators to cellular network operators. All cellular network operators holding substantial spectrum leases have chosen to require the use of patented protocols to communicate with their networks.
* "Same" here shall be interpreted in accordance with the doctrine of equivalents.
Google are using their current status to make people use their other programs as much as possible. This is similar to how Microsoft used Windows to make people use Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.
You also need to keep in mind that Google is a marketing company. They are not providing anything for free, they take your information (and manipulate you to provide even more information via their other programs) and use it to sell marketing to companies.
But to be fair, I would love for the EU to go after both Microsoft and Google.
It's seems to me that Microsoft is hurting Google's brand. Microsoft is going to continually go after more and more companies. Google needs to make a stand! Enough is enough.
I don't see USB for internal storage.
WTF is a CF port. and is UDF the other port type?
>You're the one who claimed that Microsoft contributed something, so you're the one who have to show that competitors got their ideas from reading Microsoft's patents.
The patent system does not protect independent later invention. You don't have to show that you knew of the patent when you implemented something to infringe. See 35 USC 271.
I don't see USB for internal storage.
For internal storage on a PC, continue to use SATA. For internal storage on a smartphone, the manufacturer ought to just solder more flash memory to the motherboard.
WTF is a CF port. and is UDF the other port type?
CompactFlash (CF) is a storage interface proposed as an alternative to Secure Digital (SD). UDF (Universal Disk Format) is a file system proposed as an alternative to FAT.
fat32 is not patented
The method used to encode long file names in FAT32 is patented, unless that patent expired very recently. Did it?
you can also use wifi to present a network drive
That's in fact what I ended up doing when my PC was having problems with the implementation of MTP on my Nexus 7 tablet. But that doesn't help if you have authority to connect a device to the USB port but not to associate it to the WLAN. This has happened to me in various homes that either A. didn't have Wi-Fi or B. didn't want my devices on their Wi-Fi.
What I don't get about FAT32 is, if (say) I reverse engineered it and created my own code to read/write it, isn't that totally legal? And fair? And pretty much the same as we've been doing with legacy Office (.doc/.xls) files for years?
So is it that they're claiming some kind of patent on something "special" that FAT32 does? And presumably they couldn't/didn't do the same with Office because everything it does it pretty much just like any other office suite?
Scenario A: Google back when they initially developed Android ran into a design roadblock. ...
Scenario B: Google developed Android without ever having heard of any MS patents.....
Have you heard of my "method to present alternative possibiliies in a 'Scenario A: Scenario B: - structure" ??
Care to tell about it for one pretty uninformed individual?
I don't know much about TPM and new hardware encryption thingy (for DRM?)
Alice vs. CLS Bank has been widely read to outlaw, or at the very least greatly restrict, software patents in the US. Perhaps Microsoft's parasitic gravy train is near an end? One can only hope.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Well Google does have their remote desktop control app. I've used it to control my Windows PC from an Android tablet. So yeah.
Once again I almost threw my laptop into the wall in anger.
yet the company's with money like samsong shot down those clames.
and the very thing that caused the crash in the 80s. to many machines all not compatible with one another and many very expensive with no clue if they where going to still be alive next week.
Actually Robertson screws are a good example of a superiour product that didn't catch on (at least in the States, they've always been common in Canada) due to licensing. P. L. Robertson refused to license manufacturer to most everyone including Henry Ford who found using Robertson screws cut a couple of hours off building a Model T so Ford used Philips instead, at least in America.
I curse every time I deal with a Philips and smile when using a Robertson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It's a patent so you can't just reverse engineer it unlike if it was only copyrighted. Even if you totally independently invent it, you can't use it due to MS patent. This is one of the problems with patents, sometimes it is just time for an invention and whoever gets the patent wins. Phones were a good example, the technology was there and one day two different inventors showed up at the patent office (with another that week) to patent the phone. First one got the patent which led to the AT&T monopoly.
MS didn't actually patent the Office file formats as far as I know, probably due to not themselves knowing how they work or perhaps they weren't patentable at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That's a good point and an interesting story; I didn't know that before. You're right, that really shows the danger in being a greedy asshole and insisting on high patent royalties or worse not licensing because you want to be the only manufacturer. IIRC, the guy who invented the first working intermittent windshield wipers was like this too; instead of just selling rights to his design to Ford, he insisted on making them himself, and Ford just went around him. He eventually prevailed in court and won a large judgment, but it took a couple of decades or more, plus losing his marriage.
Luckily, we are finally starting to see more and more Robinson and Torx stuff. Philips screws are awful, though the Posi-drive variant is a little better.
Actually the "B" scenario is quite common, the technology gets to the point where something is possible and multiple inventors invent the same thing. the classic example was the telephone, due to speakers and microphones being new tech, people put them together to make a telephone. One day two inventors showed up at the patent office, first Elisha Gray whose application went into the inbox at the bottom, hours later, second, Bells partner who demanded that his application get processed right away. So Bell ended up with the patent and went on to form a famous monopoly based on that master patent (along with some vacuum tube patents later). If Gray had been more aggressive things may have ended different but the fact is that they both independently invented the telephone (along with another IIRC who tried to file later that week) because it was time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Since most device-to-computer communication now is via mtp or wireless : why use FAT32? For Android (especially Samsung) F2FS would make far more sense.
Except in this case, the patent is for the use of VFAT, which is a very specific file system format that even Microsoft doesn't use much anymore, but is commonly understood by their systems.
There is no reason, for example, why Microsoft couldn't implement an open file system like EXT4 or UFS and update all their operating systems to recognize it, except that it would mitigate the value of their VFAT patents. So they don't bother.
I remember reading that they make more money on their patents from Android vendors than they make *gross* from their Windows Mobile sales.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It's called bundling. Microsoft can't say which specific patents are being violated because they aren't completely sure. Some they do know, others they think may be, depending on how Android is configured and what apps are installed.
Instead, they say "we know you are violating a bunch of our patents. Our one-time offer is a license to 1000's of our patents [but not all, as we still reserve the right to ask for more later] for an up-front fee, money for already-shipped devices, and a per-unit royalty in perpetuity."
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Let's see proper criticism? Ok Give me ALL their brand names so we know which ones to bury burn or otherwise mutilate. I will have to shop wisely to find a company they have NOT assimilated. Borg Gates. Your MSoffice purchase allows this sort of dominating. So SSstop it.
I wonder about the filesystem patents when most big Android vendors have now killed off the use of SD cards in phones.
There's no need at all to use FAT unless you've for media that is going between phones and PC's. When transferring by wifi or USB/app, the FS doesn't matter
Google is certainly using their current status to encourage people to user their other programs as much as possible. Yes, that's their business model. But they don't force people to use them. Google services need to be damn good and damn useful to get people to use them. No amount of encouragement has been able to get people to use Google+, despite the fact that by all accounts it's a really nice system. Facebook has the 'network effect' tying users to their platform. Microsoft has a similar network affect forcing huge numbers of people to use MSOffice - despite the availability of free 'good enough' alternatives.
Google is still winning on the merits. You can't just cry antitrust because they're big. Now there may indeed be some gray areas where they're abusing their leading search position. But there's not much of a network effect in search. Switching search engines is the easiest thing in the world for an end user to do. Making money off of a search engine is harder. But antitrust doesn't require that your competitors succeed - only that you don't abuse your position to prevent them from succeeding.
It seems like the biggest complainants are other shopping sites that aggregate freely available shopping info and find you the best deal. Who said that that's a business model that has to be protected? They're doing exactly what Google does - and complaining because Google doesn't steer traffic to them. If their sites are good enough, then advertise them an make yelp a verb like google. Yeah, there was a brief period when google didn't have its own shopping results, and others stepped in and built businesses around that vacuum. Does that mean that vacuum needs to be preserved just because they're in that business now?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
You know, Google's actually quite good about patents. They actually worked around all the patents in Android - it was only the likes of Samsung that decided that the de-facto Android UI wasn't 'good enough' and decided to follow the iPhone. Which is why Apple went after Samsung, and not Google. Because Google worked around it in Android (the rounded corners patent), while Samsung basically implemented the entire patent.
Google got rid of the SD slot on the Galaxy Nexus for that reason as well - they saw the patents, and the easiest way to avoid it was to not have to worry about it. So you dump the SD slot, which means you don't need to support FAT32. Ah, but internal storage - you solve that by using MTP instead of MSC. Boom, you do not need to license FAT32 at all on a Google Nexus device.
Android avoids a lot of patent issues. It's just that manufacturers bring them back in - want MSC or SD slot? Now you have to support to FAT32. Want to look like an iPhone? Now you have to pay Apple.
I agree that Robertson are better in general than Philips but they were designed for different applications and are not direct replacements for each other. Philips is designed to cam-out which prevents over tightening during assembly.
I like hex drive and Torx which both support angled drivers but Robertson is just as good in that respect.
Henry Ford seemed to think they were close enough to be direct replacements so he replaced Robertson with Philips. This at a time when cam-out was important due to inexact driver torque.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism