[SWLUG] Microsoft Vs. Linux Celtic Manor July 7th - anybody going?

[Steve Anderson]

Peter Joseph wrote:

> I would be happy to raise the issue of  M$ patent portfolio, can you 
> give me any actual examples to read about/quote?

First one that springs to mind is the patenting of Wordprocessor files 
stored as XML, as reported here:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1458740,00.asp

This is an 'invention', say Microsoft, despite the fact Abiword has done 
this for about 7 years. Then there's the recent To-Do list patent (I 
believe again there's some prior art problems there) and the ridiculous 
double-click patent. There's prior art for all of these, but having got 
a patent they can now demand licensing fees or litigate. Even though 
there's prior art, there would have to be a courtroom appearance to 
bring this up, which means lawyers, which means cash; which means people 
not making any money from their work wouldn't be able to defend themselves.

The wording of all patents are as ambiguous as can be imagined - so it 
can be argued to stretch over all manner of uses - and the double-click 
one is no exception. Link here to the text: http://tinyurl.com/3aubf
The opening sentence is: "A method and system are provided for extending 
the functionality of application buttons on a limited resource computing 
device." Whilst Microsoft are publicly saying 'we mean PDAs', try and 
find a computer which doesn't have, in some way, a limited resource.

A half-hour googling will doubtless find more things that could be used 
as Microsoft's last stand. I didn't know until a moment ago that they'd 
got a patent on Bayesian email filtering, after all...

Steve

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