Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has sued 397 companies

Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by yaix on Thursday March 03, 2011 @06:08AM (#2283577)

They wanted software patents on trivial ideas.

Now they have them and don't like them?

Well, I hope the "troll" wins, maybe the big ones then start lobbying against "patents on ideas".

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Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by statictype on Thursday March 03, 2011 @06:44AM (#2283638)

In the defense of Microsoft and Google, they typically filed patents as defensive measures to mitigate against what they saw as a broken system.

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Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by beagle3 on Thursday March 03, 2011 @09:34AM (#2284103)

Except Microsoft _has_ used patent threats in the past (e.g. against the VirtualDub project, and there are a few more). When the threat comes from Microsoft, and it goes to what is essentially a one-man-show open source project, you don't actually need to get to court.

It's called "a chilling effect".

Furthermore, Ballmer was, and still is, FUDding all the time about Microsoft going to enforce patents that Linux infringes (though not name anything). Even though no action was taken, it also has a chilling effect.

Your defense is acceptable for google. Microsoft deserves to be patent trolled.

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Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by kenjackson on Thursday March 03, 2011 @11:38AM (#2284645)

The VirtualDub case is an interesting one. I wish the author would have pushed it a bit more. I suspect that there was no threat of a lawsuit, but rather an engineer who saw VirtualDub and was POed. Legal at companies like Intel, IBM, and MS generally won't let someone from the actual product team call another company on a legal matter.

My suspicion is that it was just a rogue employee who frankly probably wouldn't have had support from legal, since legal at these organizations tend to be more strategic than tactical (they don't care about one-off infringers, but are usually pushing a bigger strategic story, where patents infringement is just part of it).

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Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by kprobst on Thursday March 03, 2011 @02:17PM (#2285339)

> VirtualDub

http://www.advogato.org/article/101.html

A far cry, I think, from a patent troll takedown.

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Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by naner on Thursday March 03, 2011 @10:26AM (#2284333)

Microsoft has used patent threats to extract a "Linux tax" from vendors such as Amazon and a number of smaller companies.

Microsoft has also directly sued for software patent infringement. (TomTom got sued for using Fat32, presumably for refusing to pay Microsoft's "Linux tax".)

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Re:Microsoft and Google jointly sue a patent troll who has s... by naner on Thursday March 03, 2011 @10:23AM (#2284314)

Well, I hope the "troll" wins

The troll didn't go after Microsoft or Google directly, it went after hundreds of smaller companies that it had a better chance of defeating.

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