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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.
If I run Linux in azure, will I then be protected against patent lawsuits from microsoft that they believe that Linux violates? :D
The summary (as well as the cited article) gloms together two unrelated issues. The 10,000 patents have nothing to do with protection against patent trolls -- by definition, trolls typically don't have an active business and therefore there's nothing to infringe patents that a defendant might counter-assert.
The original MS blog post clearly separates the unlimited indemnification (useful for all patent suits, including troll suits) from access to the 10,000 patents (potentially useful for patent suits filed by real operating companies who might have products of their own that fall under MS's patents).
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