07.11.08
Latest Patent Abuse from Microsoft, Acacia, and Rambus
Three villains, three new stories
The next post will show Microsoft’s latest attempt to modify the law. Setting of a precedence is part of such initiatives, so it’s worth emphasising yet again Novell’s role in this, even in light of the following report.
One word of caution: Don’t make patent licensing a hurdle that your open-source (or proprietary) partners have to leap to do business with Microsoft. We won’t. Novell plugged its nose and did it in the name of interoperability, but it has rarely mentioned the patent covenant since then (not exactly a ringing endorsement). Microsoft may have noticed that its partner announcements with leading open-source companies like MySQL dried up after the Novell deal.
Remember Acacia, the company that houses former Microsoft employees [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] and sued Novell over software patents? Well, they are at it again.
Look at the ‘brilliant’ idea that they ‘own’ and have just made money from.
Acacia Research Corporation announced today that its Disc Link Corporation subsidiary has entered into a license agreement with Smith Micro Software, Inc. covering patents relating to portable storage devices with links. The portable storage devices with links technology generally relates to products sold or distributed on CDs or DVDs that include a link to retrieve additional data via the Internet.
The brain-dead USPTO must be proud to have ‘defended’ patent trolls against the ‘stealing’ of such wonderful ‘innovations’. But wait. There’s more.
The patent-ambushing, patent-in-a-standard Rambus (mentioned before in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]) is still making a mockery out of the industry that surrounds it. It’s essentially looting eveyone. The latest victim is Nvidia.
Rambus on Thursday said it had filed a lawsuit against Nvidia, alleging the graphics chip vendor had infringed on memory architecture patents owned by Rambus.
Rambus is still on a warpath, undeterred and uninterrupted, showing how stupid the USPTO is. More about this here. █
