Posted on 06/09/2005 3:54:28 AM PDT by Salo
Microsoft has been found guilty of patent infringement and ordered to pay a Guatamalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado almost $9m in damages.
The US District Court of Central California court ruled that Microsoft had infringed on his intellectual property and ordered it to pay him $8.96m.
This figure relates to software sold between March 1997 and July 2003 - Judge David Carter may review this figure to include software sold since 2003, according to Reuters. Damages are far lower than the $500m claimed for because the jury rejected nine out of ten claims made by Amado.
Microsoft expressed disappointment at the verdict but welcomed the rejection of Amado's huge damages claim. The company said its engineers started work on the data transfer technology independently before Amado approached them.
In 1990 Carlos Armando Amado filed a patent for software which helped transfer data between Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft's Access database using a single spreadsheet. He said he tried to sell this technology to Microsoft in 1992 but they turned him down. According to Amado, Microsoft started including his software in their releases between 1995 and 2002.
Microsoft is facing patent claims over Longhorn, the next version of Windows, from networking company Alacritech. Its lawyers are also due in court with Forgent Networks which claims the software giant infringed its JPEG picture compression patent. ®
Tech ping
lol!
Which feels about .000000009 cents to Microsoft.
I think Microsoft was likely right: this patent sounds bogus.
On the face of it, transferring data from a spreadsheet to a relational database via a spreadsheet is about the most obvious thing that one can think of. I haven't read this patent, and maybe there is something a little deeper to it, but from a first sniff, it doesn't pass the smell test.
I'd agree.
He filed a patent that uses Microsoft's intellectual property to access Microsoft's intellectual property. Did they say the patent ISSUED?
"I haven't read this patent, and maybe there is something a little deeper to it, but from a first sniff, it doesn't pass the smell test."
Only difference between a spreadsheet and data base is the format/presentation....it's all the same data.
Which is why, or course, that after a trial, examining the evidence, and hearing arguments from both sides, the court disagrees with you.
s/or course/of course
Good thing unlike open source, I am completely insulated from any legal liability myself.
9 million dollars is 9 million dollars, not matter who it belongs to.
Do you support higher fines for people of greater means, or would you support equal application of the law?
I don't agree. I like Excel. I've used it as the primary tool for tracking $150 million construction jobs in the past. I do wish it would allow more than 65,000 rows, though.
So are users of open source. You are starting to sound the trolls mentioned in this article.
Apparantly the court agreed 90% and disagreed 10%.
I suppose it's a matter of opinion. But I will say this... I've been a software developer for nearly 20 years, and if I produced software with as many bugs as Excel has, I'd be working in a nail salon right now.
Show me some proof that users of Open Office got full legal protection for any illegal intellectual property that may be in the product, and that the liability didn't transfer to them instead. Read the GPL license, it explicitly says "no warranty".
Ever since they ate Stack software compression via a bogus court ordered settlement, I hated 'em!! :-)
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