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. ®
The problem I saw when I was initially trying to do this several years ago before I started using OpenOffice, is that Excel simply could not deal with 220 years worth of data. All dates after 1900 showed up correctly, but dates older would not be recognised as legitmate dates. From what I understood at the time, this was related to the patch made by MS to correct for Y2K. That's why I asked about it specifically. I am interested in whether or not they'd actually fixed that behavior.
The patent was issued (5,701,400) and is not specific to any Microsoft product.
Are you sure that's the right patent? 5,701,400 was filed March 8, 1995, and granted December 23, 1997, which doesn't seem to match up with the times mentioned in the article? In looking through the patent, it cites many references subsequent to 1990, which seems to me not consistent with the timeline in the story. The latest cited reference in the patent seems to be from a 1994 publication: "A relevant experience is described in "Braimakers"[sic], a book by David H. Freedman, published by Simon & Schuster in 1994 (quotes excerpted from pages 40 to 42):"
That was kind of facetious. We only installed 15,000 caissons, so I really only needed 15,000 rows.
Actually, it sounds like they agreed 98.2% and disagreed 1.8%.
It's the only patent listed with Carlos Amado as the inventor. I realize that such things are a rarity, if not thoughtcrime in some circles, but perhaps the reporter made a mistake.
Maybe. I have looked at a few other copies of this story, though, and I think that they pretty much agree on the timeline? For instance, there was an IDG story:
08 June 2005
Microsoft fined $9 million for Excel patent infringement
The little man bites giant on behind.
By Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
Microsoft has been ordered to pay $9 million for infringing a spreedsheet patent with Excel.
The jury in a Californian court awarded $8.96 million to Guatemalan inventor Carlos Amado who had sued the software giant for infringing his patent on software for linking Microsoft's Excel and Access applications through a single spreadsheet.
Amado filed for a patent on the technology in 1990 and approached Microsoft with it in 1992, said Amado's attorney, Vincent Belusko. The first infringing versions of the software appeared in 1995. Amado had sought about $400 million.
The verdict on Monday covered damages up to 31 July 2003. The court now has to consider damages from August 2003 to the present, but the additional amount will probably be less than what has already been awarded, according to Belusko.
"He wanted to be validated that this was his idea, that someone took it. I think he feels validated," Belusko said.
Microsoft said it was reviewing the verdict and other matters related to the case. "Microsoft began developing this technology as early as 1989. It was developed by our own engineers based on our own pre-existing technology," a spokesman claimed.
Really? Then why is IBM still here then.
Answer the question if I'm so predictable. I think it's pretty obvious it blew your mind.
Scorched Earth. I think he turned into a pile of ashes.
LOL! MS Word drives me batty. But I do like the animated cat character in the "search" (it can't find anything, but its cute..)
Really? Then why is IBM still here then.
I thought that was because they were selling so many mainframes to the Soviets? Well, I guess it did help get them back into the black.
What remains a mystery to me is how Sun has stayed in business.
Easy. Sun is still the volume leader in the Unix market, with 49.9% of shipments.
Microsoft is good, linux is evil... repeat 20 times and the anti oss shills will keep their insipid ranting to themselves..
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