'Protection' offered only to those who pay Microsoft for "Azure IP Advantage" [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20]

Summary: In the "cybersecurity" space, a sub-domain where many software patents have been granted by the US patent office, the patent extortion by Microsoft-connected trolls (and Microsoft's 'protection' racket) seems to carry on; but Microsoft continues to insist that it has changed its ways

LAST NIGHT I wrote my personal thoughts on the GitHub takeover (having been approached by British media for comments on the subject). I remain rather concerned, bearing in mind that there are some people out there who might fall for the elaborate PR campaign and actually believe Microsoft-funded voices.

I've decided to modify the following meme for illustrative purposes:

"Entryism is not a new strategy (see Novell and Nokia for example) and only the PR strategy has evolved."Microsoft has not really changed. Entryism is not a new strategy (see Novell and Nokia for example) and only the PR strategy has evolved. For those who bring up the patent aspects of it, here's a reminder from the Microsoft-funded IAM (funded by Microsoft as recently as this month, yet again).

They speak of "cybersecurity" in this blog post and corresponding tweet, but don't fall for buzzwords; they speak mostly about software here. To quote:

New research has revealed that IBM owns the largest portfolio of cybersecurity patents, with a little over 2,500 families. Big Blue is closely followed by Microsoft and Samsung; while Canon, Intel and Google also feature prominently among the largest players in the space, the full list of which contains many of the world’s leading patent owners. But perhaps the biggest story from the new analysis is the growth of Chinese companies in the cybersecurity sector. Companies from the clountry [sic] take nine places in the top 25.

IAM refers to China as a "clountry" rather than a country. I guess some Chinese people would find that offensive. Are they "clowns" to this patent trolls' lobby? Surely a typographical mistake, but still potentially amusing. As for the content, IBM and Microsoft pass software patents and money to patent trolls like Finjan which bully their rivals in the security space and are paying IAM for support (Finjan pays IAM, gets paid by Microsoft and Microsoft too pays IAM to promote the likes of Finjan). Are there any Microsoft competitors left (in the security space) that haven't yet been blackmailed and/or sued by Finjan? Microsoft would likely exempt from such litigation only those who pay Microsoft 'rents' for "Azure IP Advantage". That's the 'new' Microsoft, selling 'protection' money. It did the same thing with SUSE 11.5 years ago.

"When will the patent office fully catch up with caselaw and stop facilitating these extortion rackets of companies like IBM and Microsoft, which carry on actively promoting software patents (as recently as last week)?"In other news, the following new article from the financial media speaks of a "Mystery Stock Surge". This has nothing to do with patents however. Nevertheless, it reveals something about software patents of Dropbox, which could be an attractive litigation target for patent trolls after the IPO. Or maybe a plan to sell such patents in the future, offloading these to trolls?

A study from the intellectual property [sic] analytics firm Relecura notes that Dropbox holds a range of key intellectual properties, including patents to share files through a link and other ways that files interact with cloud applications. Its number of patent applications and acquisitions spiked in 2017, with the Relecura describing Dropbox's portfolio as "highly focused" on two categories: data processing and transmission.

A handful of recent patents granted this week to Dropbox deal with syncing data with content management systems, an area that could be particular interest to a range of companies looking to build out capabilities in data management or data sharing.

These are clearly software patents, so why would examiners at the USPTO grant them after Alice? Why were software patents granted to Finjan? When will the patent office fully catch up with caselaw and stop facilitating these extortion rackets of companies like IBM and Microsoft, which carry on actively promoting software patents (as recently as last week)? ⬆