Attempted BoFHerry?
<i> ... agreed to conclude their patent litigation at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ... </i>
Euphemisms, euphemisms ...
Microsoft and the force-feedback technology firm, Immersion, appear to have come to final terms after six years of suing each other. In the end, Immersion has agreed to pay $21m to settle its legal dispute with Redmond, and will join Microsoft's Certified Partner Program. By our count, today's settlement settles a settlement …
they get licensing fees from Microsoft for patented material, ok. Now what is up with letting Microsoft get a kickback from what licensing fees they get from Sony? First of all, that should be privileged information and none of Microsoft's business. But why would Microsoft want this? Here's why, because Microsoft wants to know how many PS3's and PS2's Sony is selling. Again, this should be privileged information and any licensing deal with Sony should include this just like I'm sure Microsoft required.
So once again, a company thinks they can go along with a Microsoft contract and walk away feeling any kind of success. they blew it by letting Microsoft walk all over them and now they are a hand tied Microsoft Certified Partner. I'm sure that lets them do all kinds of things. Not!
morons
Microsoft's lawers are usually amusingly incompetent at best and godawful cringemaking embarasingly bad if anything actually gets to court.
There is a level of competance in Microsofts handling of this case, they have troused pretty much the entire settlement from Sony and in exchange poor old Immersion gets to join Microsofts "Partner Program". Pretty much the modern equivalent of razing your city and selling your women into slavery.
What if MS demonstated a similar legal accumen in thier next anti-trust case? They might convince a Judge that yes Bill Gates did write the Linux kernal in his spare time but mislaid the diskette under a sack of dollars, or, core parts of the GCC compiler were written while R.M. Stallman was working for Microsoft. Sacry!