Free Republic

Microsoft Corp suffered a defeat on Thursday when the Supreme Court upheld a record $290 million jury verdict against the software giant for infringing a small Canadian company's patent. The justices unanimously agreed with a U.S. appeals court ruling that went against the world's largest software company in its legal battle with Toronto-based i4i. The high court refused to adopt Microsoft's lower standard to replace the long-standing requirement that a defendant in a patent infringement case prove by clear and convincing evidence that a plaintiff's patent is invalid. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft had argued that a lower standard of proof involving...

Here are the abstracts 6,415,335The present invention teaches a method and apparatus for creating and managing custom Web sites. Specifically, one embodiment of the present invention claims a computer-implemented method for managing a dynamic Web page generation request to a Web server, the computer-implemented method comprising the steps of routing the request from the Web server to a page server, the page server receiving the request and releasing the Web server to process other requests, processing the request, the processing being performed by the page server concurrently with the Web server, as the Web server processes the other requests, and...

STRASBOURG, France (AP) - The European Parliament on Wednesday rejected a proposed law to create a single way of patenting software across the European Union, a blow to big companies who had pushed hard for its adoption. The so-called software patent directive, rejected by a 648-14 vote with 18 abstentions, would have given companies EU-wide patent protection for computerized inventions ranging from programs for complex CAT scanners to ABS car-brake systems. The protection would also have extended to computer programs when the software is used in the context of realizing inventions. But lawmakers said the measure would stifle enterprise and...

Closed because of "Software-Patents" In the next few days, the European Parliament will decide about the legalisation and adoption of so-called "software patents" in Europe, which are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors out of business. This can lead to the termination of many software projects such as KNOPPIX, at least within Europe, because the holders of the over 30,000 already granted "software patents" (currently without a legal foundation) can claim exclusive rights and collect license fees for trivial things like "progress bars", "mouseclicks on online order forms", "scrolling within a window" and similar. That...