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Microsoft Now Offers Patent Troll Defense For Azure Customers (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft Azure will now offer customers protection against patent trolling, via Redmond's considerable collection of 10,000 legal patents. The practice of patent trolling has become an industry hazard for startups in the last fifteen years, with companies forming solely for the purpose of exploiting obscure or difficult-to-research patents which may overlap with the IP of startups. As of today, Azure is offering 'uncapped indemnification coverage', including coverage against open-source implementations of entities such as Hadoop, which forms the basis of Azure's HD Insight product.
The Halloween emails were almost 20 years ago. No one from that time is left in Redmond. At some point, it's time to let it go.
One can nit-pick all they want, but this is a really great move by Microsoft. We happen to use Azure already, so it's like free cookies (the yummy kind, not the browser kind).
IP Trolls are a significant threat to any business, and anything that helps is extremely welcome.
Obviously they didn't do this just out of the pure kindness of their hearts... it gives them a potential competitive advantage in the rapidly expanding cloud market. But a pretty smart one at that.
David Whatley
Does this mean that Microsoft front patent trolls like Acacia and Intellectual Ventures can still sue you for using third party cloud services.