Google: Microsoft are patent trolls
A Google patent lawyer has claimed that Microsoft only turn to patent infringement cases when their own products see less than expected success in the market.
Tim Porter, a patent lawyer working for Google, told the San Francisco Chronicle that Microsoft’s previous attacks on Linux are examples of its broader corporate strategy to benefit from competitors’ products after their own products cease to do well.
“When their products stop succeeding in the marketplace, when they get marginalized, as is happening now with Android, they use the large patent portfolio they’ve built up to get revenue from the success of other companies’ products,” he said.
Microsoft views the patent royalties it seeks from Android vendors as part of a natural evolution of a new industry, though Porter disagrees with this.
Patents on software weren’t allowed until the late 1980s, and even then the concept worried Bill Gates, who in 1991 wrote that “the industry would be at a complete standstill” if software patents were allowed. Gates worried that, “some large company will patent some obvious thing, enabling the company to take as much of our profits as they want.”
Read the full story over at: Ars Technica.
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