Microsoft sues for patent infringements on Android devices

"Microsoft sues for patent infringements on Android devices"

Should have read

"Microsoft sues for patent infringements on Barnes and Noble Android devices"

According to Gutierrez's blog post, the patents asserted by Microsoft protect innovations that:

Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;
Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;
Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;
Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and
Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.
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How on earth did they get these patents in the first place? I'd love to know what exactly was patented since the apps were likely java source based. How does one keep up with ensuring that your method of coding doesn't infringe on one or other patent out there?
Microsoft... desperate times...
 
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Not that I care for it, but does IE9 even implement any of these features M$ is wailing about?
 
Why not sue Google as well?

Please M$, tell us exactly how many billions of dollars did you spend on the research of these patents?

Software/process patents stops innovation and competition. The complete opposite of what the patent system is suppose to do. I really hope the US lawmakers will wake up soon.
 
They (Apple, Google, MS, HTC, Nokia, etc) all sue each other continuously for frivolous reasons as defensive measures. They seldom have any intention on taking these to court, it's just so that, for example, when party A sues party B for supposed patent infringment, party B has a grab bag of reciprocal suits and then they all generally kind of agree not to exercise the suits. Kind of a mutually assured destruction arrangement. Only when one or the other becomes too flagrant in their disregard, or there's an upstart, do they actually carry out the threats. This really only hurts newcomers to the market, because if you come up with your own device or OS you have to deal with the combined might of all the big players lawsuits and need really deep pockets to start filing your own patents and lawsuits to defend yourself.
 
In an official blog post, Gutierrez wrote that Microsoft is not a company that pursues litigation lightly, and that they prefer to take a license-first approach. "In fact, this is only our seventh proactive patent infringement suit in our 36-year history," he wrote.
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Oh, so you give "infringers" the choice of paying or getting sued by one of the best funded legal departments on the planet? How nice of you.
 
All patents in the tech world should seriously be re-evaluated.
More than 99% of them may have been new and ground-breaking 30 years ago but not anymore.
Every day there's a story of someone suing someone over a patent issue.

They can't sue Google as technically, they're not selling a product. The OEMs are using Android and selling it, thereby making money off 'patent infringements'.
 
Microsoft's first reaction to anything that is better than theirs is to sue... so if someone beats them with an innovation or comes up with something really cool and they didn't think of it they sue, at first to try and scare them away, or to pave the way for them to be amenable to being bought out by Microsoft.

How on earth did they get these patents in the first place?
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By doing what Corporate America does best... patent trolling FTW!!!!!
 
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Jonno2343 said:
What you've all conveniently forgotten is that the big bad Microsoft is nowhere near the only patent-trolling company about.
Apple did a very similar thing a year ago, also aimed at Android. http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/02/apple-sues-htc-for-infringing-20-iphone-patents/
Then if you look at Android stealing source from Linux who knows what's really going on in world of patents in the tech.
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Linux is GPL so you can't "steal". Maybe rather infringe on the license, but Google does neither.
 
Microsoft will sue the company with the least number of patents. In that way, they can't be counter sued for infringing on some of that companies patents.

If they sued Google, they would have had to go through the whole arsenal of Google patents to make sure they don't infringe on any of them. Too much work, so they go for the small guy, create precedent, and then sue the next bigger company based on that.
 
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