Aussie inventor in $388m Microsoft damages win
theage.com.au
theage.com.au
didn't serial-code-based shareware registration schemes exist before the 1993 filing date? certainly shareware and the concept of "registering" did -- maybe the novel part of the patent is the idea of an identifier tied to your environment as a constituent part of the serial #?
Knowingly, I guess, it's the key here. MS knew they were doing "something illegal", but decided to go anyway.
Of course, neither I or the article present any proof, as an internal corporate email saying "Yay! Let's do it anyway", but if we assume the judge gathered enough evidence to show this was done, then damages are owned.
USD 388m worth? No idea.
er, what?
Looking at his blog though: http://ricrichardson.blogspot.com/
Down on the right hand side it says "PC Online" and the title tag states "Open standard for online forums. Beta tested with advertising community".
Looking at the rest of the claims he makes, nearly all are obvious at the time that they were made.
Obvious is defined as "would another developer given the same problem create the same solution", if so then there has been no inventive step and the patent should be dismissed. This is before even considering prior art and other things... the guy is a joke.
Thats nearly 50m USD profit PER DAY. few companies can match that I guess.
Also I said this to point out that the title was misleading, and it's now been fixed. Humour was evidently an inappropriate way to bring it up.
I don't see why people get all defensive about their currency.
(It's a juicy case, that assuming there was any kernel of ingenuity to the actual patent Microsoft just made the Windows world a slightly worse place by using this patented antipiracy technology. It's kind of two evils battling against eachother. But it's no different to other patent litigations, really.)
I'm a huge believer in that people don't invent truly new things because of money but because they have to -- a man always has some vague feeling that just keeps finding a way out until it materialises into an idea.
It's also given that the one who gets the idea rarely is the one who actually benefits from it. That may hurt some people but in the end it's better for everyone to have the idea pop out from one place and let other forces build the necessary machinery required to market and distribute the idea to everyone.
Patents should be banished at once.
The exception would be investors stealing an idea they see and the solution would be contracts but I doubt investors would sign these.
However, I guess it hasn't worked well even before our times when trivial programming solutions, plant seeds, indigenous herbs, and probably soon-if-not-already DNA are being patented.
I happened to browse through the history of steam engine on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_steam_power (because pg mentioned it in http://www.paulgraham.com/revolution.html... :)) and one thing caught my eye: each time some significant steam engine related patent expired the steam engine business expanded and spread rapidly.
New ideas were combined with the previously patented ideas and new constructs became commonplace. I think that companies and patent holders, too, realise that patents are rather useless and they would all be better off without them. That is because nobody has successfully lobbied for longer patent periods in the last 100-200 years or so.
In contrast, the copyright has been extended tremendously because companies can actually make money because of it and have lobbied for decades to keep Mickey Mouse off the public domain. Makes me wonder.
Just like when it gets fined hundreds of millions by the EU, it can use these numbers to elicit sympathy, while I'm sure internal calculations show greater profit from ignoring the law or playing the patent game, even after subtracting these costs.
After all if they didn't profit from it, then they probably wouldn't do it.