VirnetX flings second patent infringement sueball at Microsoft
VirnetX is hoping to scoop up a brace of lawsuit wins against Microsoft, after it filed a second patent infringement claim against the company yesterday. On Tuesday, Redmond was ordered to pay VirnetX nearly $106m after a US jury in Texas ruled that Microsoft "willfully" used the firm's virtual private network (VPN) tech in …
Clearly they foster innovation and help encourage companies to invest in R&D.
What a pity that the innovation and investment never makes it to the technology the consumer buys, instead it goes into the legal department of companies who (quite often) hold patents but don't manufacture anything!!!!
Yet Europe seems to want to go that way as well? It's a strange, strange world
could get a law passed to allow the legal hunting of patent infringement lawyers? As the judicial system seems to give the green light to anything that contains the words "patent infringement" it has to be worth a shot, so to speak.
Didn't Microsoft have enough money to buy the company instead of risking it falling into the hands of Texans?
I'd have thought the lone star would have been a flag for anyone with money to lose.
Neither of these companies is in East Texas, so why the hell should charges be filed there(other than the fact that the East Texas courts are a revolving door for this kind of Lawsuit)? Isn't there a regulation about Jurisdiction? And if there isn't, why isn't there one?
I hate software patents and I especially hate companies that make most of their money from them, Most of them just make bad code, then try and find a place where its used (or looks like it is) in a well-known software product.
The two patents in question are actually non-obvious, non-trivial and fairly interesting. It is clearly not a "one-click" or "how to use a mouse on a cloud" patent.
The sole problem is that I do not quite see where does Windows infringe on them. I wish Windows had anything even remotely approaching the VPN tech described in them. AFAIK it does not.
Virnetxium virosa, once having successfully fastened onto it's host organism, Microsoftium monopolius, will now commence bleeding it dry. Note how the many patent-shaped radulae continuously carve increasing slices of money first from the surface layers of the Microsoftium's epidermis; next, it will invade the blood vessels and internal organs of the host. Within a short time, depleted of its blood supply, the Microsoftium will succumb to the parasite. This is not the end of the cycle, as the Virnetxium parasite will then lay its eggs in the body of its host. These will hatch into hundreds of tiny maggots, known as the patentlawyeria stage; these maggots, having consumed the remaining body of the host, will then spread out across a wide area, seeking new host organisms to fasten onto and continue the parasitic cycle.
Mine's the white lab coat with the copy of David Attenborough's Life on Earth in the pocket...
