MS at it again

AT&T FILES SUIT AGAINST MICROSOFT - [The Wall Street Journal, B18.] AT&T claims in a lawsuit that Microsoft is distributing software programs through its Windows operating systems in violation of a patent AT&T holds on a digital speech coder. AT&T contends Microsoft's TrueSpeech program, which decodes voice signals, and its NetMeeting program, which allows users to hold video and audio conference calls over the Internet, infringe a speech- coding patent issued to AT&T in 1984. The programs are included in Microsoft's current version of Windows for consumers, Windows Me, and Microsoft's Windows NT Internet information server. AT&T maintains it notified Microsoft in April 1999 that the software giant was infringing AT&T's patent. Although AT&T has offered to license the patent, Microsoft has refused a licensing arrangement, the suit claims. The suit, filed Monday in Manhattan federal court, seeks a permanent injunction barring Microsoft from 'continued acts of infringement' and an unspecified amount in damages. AT&T also seeks an assessment from the court that Microsoft willfully infringed AT&T's patent, which would triple damages under federal statutes. [Print, wire, broadcast and online coverage elsewhere.]

Are you people getting as much as I am out of this?

When former monopoly targets of the government are filing suits against MS for infringement purposes doesn't this kind of indicate to the absolutely blind that MS is an overbearing monopoly which must be broken apart before it's too late????

You know there's an old phrase, 'It takes one to know one.'

You robbed me of that one. 'It takes one to know one.'

Just goes to show ya that MS does steal code after all. And hide it under the proprietary software guise.

Patent infringement is *NOT* copyright infringement. Violating a patent doesn't have anything to do with 'stealing code'.

How can a software patent infringement not involve code ?

Erik, you need to think harder before you post.

There is code involved, sure, but it is not (necessarily) stolen. Patents offer *very* wide protection (which is why they should not be easy to get) and anything that uses the same invention is going to be subject to patent rules. This isn't too bad if patents are for genuine innovations (which is their intended use) but there has been a suspicion for a while that the USPTO is not very good at figuring out whether a patent really should be granted in the software arena...

Anyway, the upshot of patent law is that you can infringe someone's patent on some software concept without ever seeing their code or even reading documentation on the patented thing (and that includes the patent itself.) So Erik is (presumably) right in this case.

I can create a 1-Click shopping bag without copying any code from Amazon, but they will still claim that I'm infriging their patent. If I create an application where the menubar is on the very top of the computer, then Apple will sue me.

I didn't say that. I said it doesn't have anything to do with 'stealing code'. Obviously code is written, and without the code you couldn't have any infringement, but two people can write completely different code and still violate the patents of the other.

Irony at its finest.

I have to agree with Erik on this one. The code doesn't have to be even remotely similar for patent infringement.

Patents are issued for ideas, copyright is issued for a particular published expression of an idea. For example, if the Dyson Sphere and derivitive concepts had been patended (which is probably no more unlikely than some of the software patents around) I could still infringe that patent without stealing large chunks of Larry Niven's 'Ringworld' and infringing his copyright.

SF is not generally taken as being prior art when it comes to patents...

Considerring how wide patents are, I don't see a reason not to. Of course, you may need an implementation to actually get a patent.