Today Zdnet posted an article about the current patent reform bill making it's way through Congress. It's largely sponsored by Microsoft who spends roughly 100 million a year defending itself against patents. The major reform is the addition of opposition requests that can be filed up to nine months after a patent is awarded or six months after a legal notice alleging infringement is sent out. It also makes it harder to get an injunction and it recalculates the way that jury awards are calculated so that it's much harder to win an award when you are damaged.
While the general opposition to software patents in general ia applauding this bill, it's a really really bad idea. It looks as though it was tailor made for MS. The problem is that MS is a very bad patent violator. That's right Microsoft regularly steals ideas that other companies have patented and then refuses to pay the owners of those inventions. They did this to Burst Technologies. Burst was an early pioneer in audio and video streaming on the web. They developed a whole series of technologies that most everyone including Quicktime and Real now use. They attempted to license the technology to Microsoft, shared trade secret information with MS (after signing an NDA. MS then stole their technology and incorporated it into Windows Media Player.
Burst eventually was forced to lay off most of their employees. MS stole Burst's technology and was forced to pay nothing except their in house counsel to bleed Burst to death. If this new bill passes you can beat that small innovators and inventors will simnply be forced out of the system. Large corporations will simply crush them with legal paperwork with the challenge process.
I would have more sympathy for MS if they didn't prove themselves to be liars time and time again in court. This bill should be entitled "MS Patent Approval Process."
