[oclug] Microsoft Lawsuits

[Milan Budimirovic]

Adrian Irving-Beer wrote:

>IANAL, but the 'patent violations costing the customer' thing seems
>like a crock from the start.  I mean, even if every single line of
>code in Linux were, say, Microsoft property, it's been released
>under the GPL.
>
>Everyone who uses it is doing so in accordance with the license, so it
>seems to me the only person you could legally sue would be the person
>who illegally relicensed your code, and those who continue to use it
>even after it's been 'recalled'.  Right?
>
>In any case, if you ask me, Microsoft should be *promoting* free
>software across the world.  I mean, they're always moaning about how
>piracy is wrong and costs them money.  You can't pirate free software,
>so they'd decrease losses *and* make the world a more moral place! ;)
>  
>

The problem isn't with copyrights but with *software patents*. Which are 
bad enough even as a mere concept, as software is not a manufactured 
good and already benefits from excessive protection under copyright 
laws. Unfortunately, the situation has been made infinitely worse by a 
corrupt and/or inept US Patent Office, which has been indiscriminately 
handing out patents to rudimentary things like the single mouse click, 
the hyperlink or the application plug-in, and it's been handing them out 
to people who did not invent them and have no moral right to claim 
ownership of these ideas. The reason that people worry is that fighting 
a patent suit is prohibitively expensive, and the software patent 
industry is quickly becoming a thinly-disguised protection racket: you 
pay the protection money (aka the "license fee") or you get sued. Never 
mind if the plaintiff has a case or not.

The only hope is that countries outside the US resist the push by the US 
government and major software vendors to invoke software patents 
globally. The only reason why Microsoft, Sun, IBM and all the other 
patent holders have not started to enforce their patants is that they 
don't want people to see how idiotic and unjust the whole thing is.