This story is so new I havn't seen it on the internet yet. A judge just rulled against Microsoft in a case where two plaintifs said Microsoft stole the code for Internet Explorer.

One of the plaintifs is a California University and I don't remember who the other is.

Lets see Windows will not run without Internet Explorer right?

If someone finds a link to the story please post here. I heard it on TechTV, but they don't have it on the web yet.

You got that from slashdot right? Read again, you are wrong.
M$ got fined because of patent infringement, not because the stole code.

Humm... I guess you are right, I must have heard the story wrong. And geeze, TechTV news is way behind.

Anyway isn't patent infringement in the software industry just another way to say "code stealing"?

Here is the LINK.

erm.. no.

Erm... yes it is.

Patents = original ideas, so infringing a patent should mean you've copied someone's idea for something, not the actual code to implement it.

But you can't prevent someone else from implementing their own version of your idea. Otherwise someone could patent keyboard drivers and no one else would be able to write one. So to prove Microsoft infringed on their patent they'll need to prove they used the same code. Interfacing with applets is something many programs do. Microsoft is being sued because they stole code. It's not the first time that has happened and it won't be the last.

Welcome to the real and twisted world! That's exactly what they can do. That's why i'm saying, if patents existed in the stone age the wheel would of been patented.
But seriously, there is an time limit on a patent, so after an x number of years, the patents looses it validity. So if someone would have patented the keyboard drivers, it would have lost it's usefullness now.

Except that, at least in the case of publishing rights, the big publishing houses keep buying themselves new laws to keep extending the copyrights. Which is why Project Gutenberg, which was about to be able to digitize a truckload of valuable and more recent (but still 70-year old) literature suddenly can't - because just when copyrights were due to expire on them, the law was changed to close them down again.

It's the invention of managed fire that would have been copyrighted. And so most of the human race would have died. And then the remainders' numbers would have been so small that various critters and diseases would have killed those few proprietors off and we wouldn't be here today.

What I don't get is why the doctrine of laches doesn't apply to things like this ... kind of like how it should apply to SCO.

I have to disagree and agree with acid_kewpie and Proud.
Take for example this forum. Its based off of vBulletin. You have to play for vBulletin. Now go to a forum based site that uses phpBB or phpNuke that also have forums that look, act and function the same as a vBulletin site. They all perform basically the same thing but have different code.

So no, you can have a patent infringement without stealing the code behind it in software based typed patents. Another example is the Ebay lawsuit, where that one guy sued Ebay for making the "buy it now" option on their site, in which he filed for the patent and thought of it first for use on a website, etc. They didn't steal the code though, there would be many ways to perform the same function to use a "buy it now" option... etc.

Not true, windows will run without explorer remember 95. I use 98lite on my gaming system wich removes internet explorer from windows and it is way more stable than before.
http://www.litepc.com

I guess you could have a patent infringement without actually stealing code. But in the world of software mostly || usually || typically a patent infringement would involve stealing code!

Microsoft is not denying that they have the same capabilities in IE that Eolas Technologies Inc. has a patent for but they say that they wrote their own code.


I read that as they stole our code.

I read that as we didn't steal code.

I could be wrong though, and it wont be the last time.

I'm just glad to see this!

Not true, windows will run without explorer remember 95. I use 98lite on my gaming system wich removes internet explorer from windows and it is way more stable than before.

But I don't think those versions of Windows are even supported anymore by Microsoft. I know 95 isn't.

But I didn't know you could remove IE from 98... that is interesting. Of course this costs money right?

Well, first of all, a software patent doesn't even necessarily have to have proof-of-concept code. You just have to provide an algorithm. So, for all we know Eolas themselves didn't even have an implementation of their patented technology. It'd be weird, but it's possible. A patent is on an idea, not anything else. Any way you can accomplish the same idea but with a different process is STILL in violation of the patent. If someone had a patent on something and one step was "sort this list" and their reference implementation did a merge-sort, it doesn't mean that if someone rewrites that part as a quick-sort that they are doing anything different ... same idea, different angle of attack. Another example of how to do the same thing (idea-wise, and hence, you violate the patent) without copying code is to code an implementation in a different language ... hard to copy code verbatim when the reference implementation isn't even in the language you want.