On other foot....
M$ does not like it when they are shown to be infringing and it is always someone else who is wrong. About time they were shown for what they are at last.
Microsoft was slapped with a $388m patent infringement fine yesterday, following a lengthy legal row with anti-piracy software vendor Uniloc. Redmond said it was disappointed with the verdict and added it planned to appeal. The long-running lawsuit was originally brought by Uniloc USA and its Singapore-based parent company in …
...the seemingly endless rounds of judgements and overturnings that the judicial system produces.
Surely when a trial with a competent judge reviews all the evidence and returns a verdict that should be the way it is, barring judicial fraud. How can another judge at appeal see it as the complete opposite of the first, then another appeal sees it returned to the original then other the other way again and so for years and years? If no two judges can agree doesn't this make it a bad law?
Just looks like a lawyers money-go-round to me. Either that or some gigantic game of poker where the player endlessly 'raise' until one runs out of money.
Software patents should be unilaterally terminated with extreme prejudice, no matter where they are. Having said that...
Payback is a bitch aint it Microsoft?
Now what about those commentators that went out of their way to justify Microsoft's position in the Tom Tom case. Will any step up to explain how this is any different?
OMG, take a look at Dreadmond... Sue-happy bytchbois... They loooooooove the patent when they can capitalize through litigation. But, when someone else gives them a taste of their own medicine and bends them over for a dry-pound, they start crying with their tails between their arsecheeks, waving the white flag and crying unfair. We as a community have been trying to explain to Deadmond all along that software patents should be considered invalid, but all they could see is that quick buck earned in the most disgraceful of ways... through litigation. Instead of taking the karmic bytchslap they had coming to them like they had a pair, they cop out and, out of desperation, use the same defence we have had to use on their arses because they do not like it at all when they are on the receiving end of the Line Of Pain. Maybe Micro$haft will finally realize how much software patents really lay the suction to the stones and will finally change their ways...
Yeah, right... the next opportunity that comes for them to extort a few more million from the competition, you know what will happen... they will be on it like malodorant on the proverbial, I assure you. I have no problem with companies making an honest profit with their products based on the product's merits and marketing, for that is Free Enterprise, and we all like to make sure we have those 3 squares a day and shelter, along with some of our wants fulfilled as well. But when a company thinks that they have to bolster the coffers by suppressing competition through claiming "patent infringement", that is not only bad business practice, it is unethical and worthy of a proper arse whoopin'. A company doesn't deserve a single red cent if they have to sue to get it. Perhaps if enough companies come after them and Deadmond's proverbial sphincter gets sore enough, maybe they will finally get the message hammered into their thick block heads that it would be in everyone's best interest to just drop the whole patent bullsheisse with the quickness.