LXer: Microsoft assembles unlikely band of brothers against patent trolls
 

Published at LXer:

Google, Apple, Yahoo!, Dell, Intel, Facebook and Hewlett-Packard have all come out in support of Microsoft’s efforts to upend a patent infringement verdict that ordered the software giant to pay $290m in damages. Microsoft is hoping to convince the US Supreme Court to rethink how the country’s judicial system decides the validity of patents.

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Finally! It's time M$ sees what $oftware Patent$ are: Darwinian methods of simply exploiting the law to tackle competition. Now that M$ is suddenly the victim of what they practically started, they now see just what they are doing to competition. In a sense, this is a pure reality check.

I'm sure they have something up their sleeve though.

The problem is that i4i isn't a patent troll, they had a real live product based on their intellectual property and Microsoft stole it. If i4i had treated Microsoft's IP as badly, you can bet your last dollar MS would not be singing this particular song. In fact they would be using patent law to have i4i shut down.

Software patents are evil, but this is about the worst case that one could pick to demonstrate that.

And on top of that, Hangdog42, M$ is a clear leader in the use of software patents and therefore the only way to get M$ to stop is for M$ to become a victim of their own burden that they are putting on other companies and the FSF.

Well, to top it off, Microsoft can't even be consistent with their stance on patents. So while they are trying to get other companies to support their efforts against i4i, they also filed suit against Google because they think Android violates some of their patents.

So I guess Microsoft's stance is that software patents are good so long as only Microsoft can use them.

Agreed. And this is definitely the way to change that. Talk about an eye for an eye!