Welcome to the New World Order

At the end of last week, Google got sued over patents.

Though Google was incorporated in 1998, Belanger said he and Baclawski had no idea the company might be infringing the patent, until about 2 1/2 years ago.

Microsoft has just been sued over a text patent.

Autotext claims that the firms have breached a patent it owns numbered 5,305,205, filed in April 1994 and which has the title "computer assisted transcription apparatus".

Acacia, which attacked GNU/Linux last month (it also has links with Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]), has just extended its 'precious' portfolio, again.

Acacia Research Corporation announced today that its Acacia Patent Acquisition Corporation subsidiary has acquired a patent for compiler technology.

Remember that Acacia does not have any products. It is a classic patent troll.

Here in the UK, insanity continues as companies attempt to change the law. They try to break it.

The High Court is set to review government restrictions on the protection of computer-implemented inventions in the U.K.

The hearing, set for 19 November follows an appeal by four small high-tech English companies against a decision of the UK-Intellectual Property Office in July. The high-tech four are challenging the UK-IPO’s refusal to accept patent claims that cover disks and downloads, thus undermining the ability of British industry to protect inventions reliant upon the development of new software.

Novell, in the mean time, continues to play Microsoft's game. Instead of relying on standards, it is paying for the 'privilege' to use Microsoft protocols. Microsoft calls it licensing, but taxation is what it really is.

"Technical support of virtualized images is an industrywide challenge," said Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell. "Our relationship with Microsoft provides us with a jointly supported solution today. Novell and Microsoft continue to collaborate to optimize bidirectional virtualization between Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise with Xen. Microsoft's server virtualization validation program provides customers with additional peace of mind when they run Windows as a guest in a validated environment such as SUSE Linux Enterprise."