8 ms·

Microsoft patent trolls Salesforce

120 points by jfi 16y ago

ccc3 16y ago
From the suit: As a result of the Defendant’s unlawful infringement of the Microsoft patents-in-suit, Microsoft has suffered and will continue to suffer damage. The patent system's primary goal seems to have become protecting patent holders, which really ought to be only a secondary function. The original purpose of patents was to encourage innovations that would benefit society. It was a simple trade: if you invent something that will help society, society will give you protection against competition for some period of time. Somehow the system has morphed from a tool for encouraging innovation into a panicked land grab. And in the case of software patents like the ones in this suit, society receives very little benefit for the protection it provides.
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  "The patent system's primary goal seems to have become protecting patent holders, which really ought to be only a secondary function. The original purpose of patents was to encourage innovations that would benefit society. It was a simple trade: if you invent something that will help society, society will give you protection against competition for some period of time." Exactly. How do you have one without the other? Should Microsoft (or any other patent holder) go to court and argue on the basis that society is not being well served? The patent owner needs to show harm, which is what patent law was supposed to protect them from. The stated reason for such laws is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", but if you are a patent or copyright holder your argument needs to be that you are not being provided the protection you had expected under the law. "And in the case of software patents like the ones in this suit, society receives very little benefit for the protection it provides." That may be. Some patents are for essentially trivial ideas, or ideas that have been in the ether for quite some time. Other patents are indeed clever, and more to the point are the results of an investment of time and money. Without some assurance of recouping that investment some number of valuable ideas would not see the light of day. (Or so I believe. I don't have any citations to back this up.) Any article that simply refers to a patent abstract as proof of the triviality of a patent is itself trolling. Patent abstracts offer a very broad description; it is the detailed body of the patent that distinguishes it.
  - ccc3 16y ago
    -Exactly. How do you have one without the other? If obvious patents are granted, society will be giving it's protection at a net loss. For society there is a cost incurred in enforcing protection as well as an opportunity cost in forbidding competition (assuming you believe competition creates better products). This trade-off could be worth it, but only if if the invention would not have emerged, or would have taken a long time to emerge, without protection. -Should Microsoft (or any other patent holder) go to court and argue on the basis that society is not being well served? Absolutely not. They should never have to argue for anyone but themselves in court. Microsoft is just playing the patent game by the rules that exist today. My problem is with a system that is neglecting its purpose. The problem seems to be rooted in patent rules that are massively out of touch with the current state (and pace) of technology. -Any article that simply refers to a patent abstract as proof of the triviality of a patent is itself trolling. Patent abstracts offer a very broad description; it is the detailed body of the patent that distinguishes it. You're absolutely right in saying that it's not fair to criticize a patent simply by its abstract. The problem is that often the detailed description in the body of the patent is far too broad. Many patents have less to do with a specific invention and more to do with gaining blanket coverage of a large swath of IP. This is the game that large companies and their patent lawyers are playing. I would argue that a system where "he who has the most lawyers wins" is very counterproductive to invention and innovation.
- eagleal 16y ago
  I will be downmodded that much, that I would see the core of Earth, but I have to say it: "a tool for encouraging innovation into a panicked land grab" was the primary goal. Think: who was the people who created patents young/pour inventors, or elite ones that wanted protection from the hungry ones? It was known even to them that patents were a tool for controlling innovation to their interests (unnaccessible fees, even to poor people). The point is a "patent" of an "invention" should be a right of a citizen, without additional fees. It's not a product, it's a right within the community! EDIT: We all want to believe that our founders were truly ingenuous good people. But the truth is, they'll never be.
ct4ul4u 16y ago
It's not a patent troll when a competitor goes after you with patents they acquired doing R&D for real products. The patents sound like they shouldn't have been issued, but that's a different problem. A troll has no real business other than acquiring patents and suing companies (or arranging for them to be sued).
- ericb 16y ago
  I think this is semantics. You don't have to be a patent troll-an entity like you describe with no other real business, in order to go patent trolling. MS is trying to be a troll under the bridge for Salesforce, and if you look at the patents, they are so broad and non-innovative that using them in an offensive manner constitutes trolling.
  - ct4ul4u 16y ago
    I don't think you can evaluate this by looking at the patents. If your sole business is patent suits, you're going to sue every time. If your business has paying customers, there's a chance you're going to spend more of your attention on them than your patent portfolio.
- wildjim 16y ago
  I kind-of thought that was what a patent-troll did these days: get as many wide-ranging patents as possible, no matter whether they should've been granted, and use them to either batter the competition (i.e. with license fees or unending court battles) or getting your "cut" with little actual effort... ?
  - pyre 16y ago
    Patent trolls have traditionally been groups whose only (or just main) business/source of income comes from buying up patents and suing over them. Today people tend to apply 'patent troll' to situations where they feel that the plaintiff is 'trolling' the defendant through the use of patent law. This is applied more-so when the patents are thought to be invalid or the business reasons for filing suit are deemed to be anti-competitive.
10ren 16y ago
It's pointless looking at patent titles (or abstracts), You have to examine the claims. Even there, you can't just look at claim 1, because the standard approach is to begin by claiming overbroadly, and then narrowing the claims, so that usually claim 1 wouldn't be expected to hold up, but one of the later ones. Which later ones, you don't know because of the uncertainties of litigation: it's hard to predict what a court will find. As in negotiating, why not ask for as much as possible? It's a little bit like the dubious criminal defence I didn't kill him, and if I did it was an accident. btw typo: in "for infringing the following patent", patent should be "patents". That confused me. Gee I sound like a patent advocate/apologist. It's just that I love inventions. EDIT I'm not arguing for these particular patents, but against how they're being assessed.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- micks56 16y ago
  If claim 1 is tossed then subsequent claims based on claim 1, which will probably be many, are automatically tossed. Therefore claim 1 better be your best claim. For example, in "Method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data," if Claim 1 is tossed, then claims 2-9 automatically go with it.
  - tkeller 16y ago
    This is absolutely not the case.
    - MattF 16y ago
      Sorry, I meant to upvote you but clicked the wrong arrow...
  - gjm11 16y ago
    No, you've got that backwards. Suppose you have: Claim 1. A method for surviving, comprising: Cooking a meal. Claim 2. A method as in claim 1, wherein the meal is breakfast. Claim 3. A method as in claim 2, wherein the breakfast comprises sausages and bacon. Claim 4. A method as in claim 3, wherein the sausages and bacon are fried. and so on. A court might decide that there's some prior art for having meals, and toss out claim 1. But that prior art might only be for lunch and dinner, in which case claim 2 might survive. On the other hand, maybe someone else has had breakfast before (publicly enough to count as prior art). Then claim 2 goes too, but maybe claim 3 survives. Oh, too bad, it turns out that the court thinks having sausage and bacon for breakfast is obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art. Bye-bye to claim 3, but maybe frying them is an extraordinary new idea that no one else would have thought of. Of course, similar things can happen during patent prosecution (i.e., filing; the terminology is silly), only now it's the patent office that keeps objecting to your claims and requiring you to fall back to weaker dependent claims. It's absolutely standard for your first claim to be very broad, and subsequent ones to be narrower. It's absolutely not standard for claim 1 to be "best" in the sense of "least likely to be invalidated".
geoffc 16y ago
This is unusual behavior for MS. I wonder if this is the opening move in a buyout/takeover gambit.
- CoryMathews 16y ago
  expanding on "unusual" its only the 4th time they have done this.
  - geoffc 16y ago
    I don't have the specifics but I believe the other times were narrower claims against specific technologies. This is a broad brush stroke against an entire industry segment.
- danieldon 16y ago
  The lawsuit might be unusual, but it's not unusual for Microsoft to try to get companies to pay licensing for trivial patents in its portfolio. They've been engaged in aggressively pursuing licensing deals around their patents for a number of years: http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft--license-to-deal/2100-1012_3-5440881.html?tag=mncol;txt http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft--license-to-deal/2100-1012_3-... Most of the time companies just pay up, as in the recent Amazon licensing deal. Salesforce apparently decided not to. Both this situation and the one with Amazon also suggest that they are now specifically targeting online/SaaS companies.
bcardarella 16y ago
I think this is a pretty bullshit move by MS but I have a hard time feeling back for Salesforce. Their software really sucks.
- novum 16y ago
  Can you be more specific? [Disclaimer: I work for salesforce.]
  - bcardarella 16y ago
    Your API is terrible. That wouldn't be such an issue if the documentation was any good. Getting an answer from tech support even though we were paying customers never happened.
    - novum 16y ago
      Again, can you be more specific? Which API: Visualforce, Apex, web services, chatter, ... ? What about it needs improvement?
marknutter 16y ago
I understand the need for people on HN to play devil's advocate and try to defend Microsoft's actions, but I don't think there's much of a case here in their favor, even if one did really dig into the patents. Microsoft should be spending its time and resources making their own software better, not suing other successful companies. To me this whole debacle stinks of desperation. Microsoft can't figure out how to find success in the web applications space and out of frustration are simply choosing to sue the most successful SaaS companies. I knew things were getting bad at MS, but I didn't realize they were this bad.
- Maascamp 16y ago
  I'm sorry but that's a pretty weak argument. So does that mean that any company with patents should just suck it up if someone infringes instead of defending their IP? Regardless of what you think of the validity of patent, it was granted and MS has a right to defend it. If you put in time doing research and then spend time and money patenting that research because you believe it to be innovative (subjective), would you just suck it up and "try to make your own software better" if someone copied your work?
  - flatline 16y ago
    Among all the companies out there that are arguably violating these patents, they choose to go after a high profile, successful, primarily online company who has been in business using these technologies for years. This is highly selective and to me indicates that the GP's point probably has some validity. Can anyone really argue that Salesforce of all companies has somehow infringed on Microsoft's IP? If they had been enforcing these patents earlier on and enforcing them uniformly, it would have seemed much less of a patent-troll style maneuver.
    - smallblacksun 16y ago
      If they had instead gone after lots of small companies, you would be complaining that they were abusing the little guy who couldn't defend himself. This is not patent trolling because Microsoft actually uses these patents in their software.
anujseth 16y ago
I don't care if I get down voted to oblivion for this, but I can't take the assholery anymore. When Apple et. al. file such suits its strategic, when they arbitrarily try to kill stuff its also strategic and jobs being jesus.Microsoft so much as moves a muscle and Apple trolls that have infested todays 'new' media and companies such as the above swing into action. Fucking 37 signals, what a sad day indeed.
- anujseth 16y ago
  My karma goes down 4 then up 4, and is pretty much stagnant. I should make a clarification here, I do not support patents at all. The above rant is merely directed towards double standards.
- mtarnovan 16y ago
  I agree with your observation. Also I think some of the posters here of HN are trying to hard to play devil's advocate based on how much they like that particular devil.
- ElliotH 16y ago
  To be fair I think we can all agree that Microsoft's use of these patents is strategic. Lots of things can be strategic. The question is whether or not its right - which, since software patents are involved, a lot of people don't think it is. (On the whole I don't think Apple have been doing so fantastically in the tech press with their current closed platform anyway.)
btilly 16y ago
Given the state of the patent system, I think that these are not horrible patents. Sure, I don't like them either. But remember that the patent system is supposed to protect things that are obvious after you've seen them, but which aren't that easy to think up. We've all seen the technologies, so of course they are obvious to us now. But were they obvious at the time? Take, for instance, patent #8, "Method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer" (see http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,845,077.PN.&OS=PN/5,845,077&RS=PN/5,845,077 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec... for details). It covers a system for having lots of machines keep themselves up to date with a central repository. Obvious, right? We can all think of a ton of examples. For instance Debian's apt fits virtually all of the claims except the ones involving payment. (For some reason Debian doesn't worry about that much. :-) ) But look when it was filed. November 27, 1995. That's well before apt. In fact it was the same year that Debian first released dselect. I don't know if dselect was advanced enough back then match the patent. If so then that is prior art and I'd suggest that Salesforce's lawyers look carefully at it. If it is not, then finding prior art may be a challenge. People today are used to subscription-based software distribution. But pick up Founders at Work and read the interview with Arthur van Hoff about Marimba, which was founded in 1996 (after the patent was filed) and was in the business of subscription-based software with automatic updates. He talks a bit about how new the idea was, and how it was difficult to get people to try it. That tells me that, at the time and with the way people were used to working, this technology really was new and innovative. Now I really, really hope that someone can find prior art and smack Microsoft down. I don't want this kind of patent to threaten software I use. But as far as patents go, this seems relatively good. (The fact that it is still bad is an argument against software patents in general, and not this particular patent.)
- angelbob 16y ago
  I was at Carnegie Mellon University in 1995. The machines in the computer clusters there downloaded a central image from central servers to overwrite the machine, regularly. I imagine it used rsync, though I don't know for sure. This had definitely been implemented and in regular use before 1995.
sbov 16y ago
Some of these patents were assigned in the mid-90's. Where has Microsoft been all this time? Patents should have an "enforce it or lose it" clause. Some of these may have been novel at the time of filing. However, after some time of being unenforced, they become standard practice in an industry. Then after 10 years of standard use some company comes out of nowhere and tries to enforce it? Too late.
- smallblacksun 16y ago
  Trademarks have the "enforce it or lose it" clause. This causes companies to be forced to go after all non-commercial use of the trademark, causing hassles for the people they are going after, and money for the company. That doesn't necessarily mean that your idea is a bad one, jut that you have to watch out for unintended consequences.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    It would have the awesome intended consequence of exposing how patents actually hinder innovation, not improve it.
motters 16y ago
I say this with some reluctance because I've written quite a lot of Mono/C# code, but to me this absolutely proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the software patent threat from Microsoft is real and not just some abstract academic debate. I think I'll be limiting or scaling down my use of .NET on linux in future as a consequence.
- WalterGR 16y ago
  > to me this absolutely proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the software patent threat from Microsoft is real and not just some abstract academic debate. Honest question follows after the quote. http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/05/microsoft_sues_salesforcecom_alleging_patent_infringement.html http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/05/microsoft_sues_sale... > "Although Microsoft has been a frequent target of patent-infringement claims itself, it's only the fourth time in its history that the Redmond company has filed a patent-infringement suit against a competitor, and the company has said in the past that it views such actions as a last resort when it has been unable to negotiate a licensing deal." Do you use technology provided by (just throwing out names) Google, Apple, HTC, Oracle, etc.? Have they proven to be less litigious? If you do use technology provided by other companies, are you also planning on scaling back their use?
  - motters 16y ago
    I'm thinking in terms of programming languages rather than products from particular companies. Recently I've gone back to using C/C++ and might also start using Python. As far as I know there are no software patent issues with those languages.
raphar 16y ago
I've some questions about "A method for providing a web page having an embedded menu to a web browser and for displaying the web page to a user of the web browser are provided." The original text: A request for a web page is received from a web browser In response to the request, a web page and an applet associated with the web page are packaged for transmission to the web browser. The web page and the applet are then transmitted to and downloaded by the web browser. When the web page is displayed and the applet is executed by the web browser, the applet creates and manages an embedded menu in the displayed web page under control of the applet . This embedded menu provides a user of the web browser with a plurality of links through one action in the displayed web page An applet? Does Salesforce use an applet to draw its menus? (that's so '90s). Is the patent valid if Salesforces does its menus only with HTML? ADDED: May Flash be considered as an applet?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- jcromartie 16y ago
  Based on the patent claims, they are talking about absolutely nothing more than a Java applet with a menu in it. This is insane.
tzs 16y ago
Is it really hacker news every time some idiot writes yet another inaccurate article about a patent lawsuit?
lionshare 16y ago
For the record: This time 37 signals is perfectly right. These patents are absurd. The most is "objects for keeping settings". Really, they just covered everything out there, any software, any device. The court should dismiss these patents.

120 points by jfi 16y ago

ccc3 16y ago

From the suit: As a result of the Defendant’s unlawful infringement of the Microsoft patents-in-suit, Microsoft has suffered and will continue to suffer damage. The patent system's primary goal seems to have become protecting patent holders, which really ought to be only a secondary function. The original purpose of patents was to encourage innovations that would benefit society. It was a simple trade: if you invent something that will help society, society will give you protection against competition for some period of time. Somehow the system has morphed from a tool for encouraging innovation into a panicked land grab. And in the case of software patents like the ones in this suit, society receives very little benefit for the protection it provides.

jamesbritt 16y ago
"The patent system's primary goal seems to have become protecting patent holders, which really ought to be only a secondary function. The original purpose of patents was to encourage innovations that would benefit society. It was a simple trade: if you invent something that will help society, society will give you protection against competition for some period of time." Exactly. How do you have one without the other? Should Microsoft (or any other patent holder) go to court and argue on the basis that society is not being well served? The patent owner needs to show harm, which is what patent law was supposed to protect them from. The stated reason for such laws is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", but if you are a patent or copyright holder your argument needs to be that you are not being provided the protection you had expected under the law. "And in the case of software patents like the ones in this suit, society receives very little benefit for the protection it provides." That may be. Some patents are for essentially trivial ideas, or ideas that have been in the ether for quite some time. Other patents are indeed clever, and more to the point are the results of an investment of time and money. Without some assurance of recouping that investment some number of valuable ideas would not see the light of day. (Or so I believe. I don't have any citations to back this up.) Any article that simply refers to a patent abstract as proof of the triviality of a patent is itself trolling. Patent abstracts offer a very broad description; it is the detailed body of the patent that distinguishes it.
- ccc3 16y ago
  -Exactly. How do you have one without the other? If obvious patents are granted, society will be giving it's protection at a net loss. For society there is a cost incurred in enforcing protection as well as an opportunity cost in forbidding competition (assuming you believe competition creates better products). This trade-off could be worth it, but only if if the invention would not have emerged, or would have taken a long time to emerge, without protection. -Should Microsoft (or any other patent holder) go to court and argue on the basis that society is not being well served? Absolutely not. They should never have to argue for anyone but themselves in court. Microsoft is just playing the patent game by the rules that exist today. My problem is with a system that is neglecting its purpose. The problem seems to be rooted in patent rules that are massively out of touch with the current state (and pace) of technology. -Any article that simply refers to a patent abstract as proof of the triviality of a patent is itself trolling. Patent abstracts offer a very broad description; it is the detailed body of the patent that distinguishes it. You're absolutely right in saying that it's not fair to criticize a patent simply by its abstract. The problem is that often the detailed description in the body of the patent is far too broad. Many patents have less to do with a specific invention and more to do with gaining blanket coverage of a large swath of IP. This is the game that large companies and their patent lawyers are playing. I would argue that a system where "he who has the most lawyers wins" is very counterproductive to invention and innovation.
eagleal 16y ago
I will be downmodded that much, that I would see the core of Earth, but I have to say it: "a tool for encouraging innovation into a panicked land grab" was the primary goal. Think: who was the people who created patents young/pour inventors, or elite ones that wanted protection from the hungry ones? It was known even to them that patents were a tool for controlling innovation to their interests (unnaccessible fees, even to poor people). The point is a "patent" of an "invention" should be a right of a citizen, without additional fees. It's not a product, it's a right within the community! EDIT: We all want to believe that our founders were truly ingenuous good people. But the truth is, they'll never be.

ct4ul4u 16y ago

It's not a patent troll when a competitor goes after you with patents they acquired doing R&D for real products. The patents sound like they shouldn't have been issued, but that's a different problem. A troll has no real business other than acquiring patents and suing companies (or arranging for them to be sued).

ericb 16y ago
I think this is semantics. You don't have to be a patent troll-an entity like you describe with no other real business, in order to go patent trolling. MS is trying to be a troll under the bridge for Salesforce, and if you look at the patents, they are so broad and non-innovative that using them in an offensive manner constitutes trolling.
- ct4ul4u 16y ago
  I don't think you can evaluate this by looking at the patents. If your sole business is patent suits, you're going to sue every time. If your business has paying customers, there's a chance you're going to spend more of your attention on them than your patent portfolio.
wildjim 16y ago
I kind-of thought that was what a patent-troll did these days: get as many wide-ranging patents as possible, no matter whether they should've been granted, and use them to either batter the competition (i.e. with license fees or unending court battles) or getting your "cut" with little actual effort... ?
- pyre 16y ago
  Patent trolls have traditionally been groups whose only (or just main) business/source of income comes from buying up patents and suing over them. Today people tend to apply 'patent troll' to situations where they feel that the plaintiff is 'trolling' the defendant through the use of patent law. This is applied more-so when the patents are thought to be invalid or the business reasons for filing suit are deemed to be anti-competitive.

10ren 16y ago

It's pointless looking at patent titles (or abstracts), You have to examine the claims. Even there, you can't just look at claim 1, because the standard approach is to begin by claiming overbroadly, and then narrowing the claims, so that usually claim 1 wouldn't be expected to hold up, but one of the later ones. Which later ones, you don't know because of the uncertainties of litigation: it's hard to predict what a court will find. As in negotiating, why not ask for as much as possible? It's a little bit like the dubious criminal defence I didn't kill him, and if I did it was an accident. btw typo: in "for infringing the following patent", patent should be "patents". That confused me. Gee I sound like a patent advocate/apologist. It's just that I love inventions. EDIT I'm not arguing for these particular patents, but against how they're being assessed.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
micks56 16y ago
If claim 1 is tossed then subsequent claims based on claim 1, which will probably be many, are automatically tossed. Therefore claim 1 better be your best claim. For example, in "Method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data," if Claim 1 is tossed, then claims 2-9 automatically go with it.
- tkeller 16y ago
  This is absolutely not the case.
  - MattF 16y ago
    Sorry, I meant to upvote you but clicked the wrong arrow...
- gjm11 16y ago
  No, you've got that backwards. Suppose you have: Claim 1. A method for surviving, comprising: Cooking a meal. Claim 2. A method as in claim 1, wherein the meal is breakfast. Claim 3. A method as in claim 2, wherein the breakfast comprises sausages and bacon. Claim 4. A method as in claim 3, wherein the sausages and bacon are fried. and so on. A court might decide that there's some prior art for having meals, and toss out claim 1. But that prior art might only be for lunch and dinner, in which case claim 2 might survive. On the other hand, maybe someone else has had breakfast before (publicly enough to count as prior art). Then claim 2 goes too, but maybe claim 3 survives. Oh, too bad, it turns out that the court thinks having sausage and bacon for breakfast is obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art. Bye-bye to claim 3, but maybe frying them is an extraordinary new idea that no one else would have thought of. Of course, similar things can happen during patent prosecution (i.e., filing; the terminology is silly), only now it's the patent office that keeps objecting to your claims and requiring you to fall back to weaker dependent claims. It's absolutely standard for your first claim to be very broad, and subsequent ones to be narrower. It's absolutely not standard for claim 1 to be "best" in the sense of "least likely to be invalidated".

geoffc 16y ago

This is unusual behavior for MS. I wonder if this is the opening move in a buyout/takeover gambit.

CoryMathews 16y ago
expanding on "unusual" its only the 4th time they have done this.
- geoffc 16y ago
  I don't have the specifics but I believe the other times were narrower claims against specific technologies. This is a broad brush stroke against an entire industry segment.
danieldon 16y ago
The lawsuit might be unusual, but it's not unusual for Microsoft to try to get companies to pay licensing for trivial patents in its portfolio. They've been engaged in aggressively pursuing licensing deals around their patents for a number of years: http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft--license-to-deal/2100-1012_3-5440881.html?tag=mncol;txt http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft--license-to-deal/2100-1012_3-... Most of the time companies just pay up, as in the recent Amazon licensing deal. Salesforce apparently decided not to. Both this situation and the one with Amazon also suggest that they are now specifically targeting online/SaaS companies.

bcardarella 16y ago

I think this is a pretty bullshit move by MS but I have a hard time feeling back for Salesforce. Their software really sucks.

novum 16y ago
Can you be more specific? [Disclaimer: I work for salesforce.]
- bcardarella 16y ago
  Your API is terrible. That wouldn't be such an issue if the documentation was any good. Getting an answer from tech support even though we were paying customers never happened.
  - novum 16y ago
    Again, can you be more specific? Which API: Visualforce, Apex, web services, chatter, ... ? What about it needs improvement?

marknutter 16y ago

I understand the need for people on HN to play devil's advocate and try to defend Microsoft's actions, but I don't think there's much of a case here in their favor, even if one did really dig into the patents. Microsoft should be spending its time and resources making their own software better, not suing other successful companies. To me this whole debacle stinks of desperation. Microsoft can't figure out how to find success in the web applications space and out of frustration are simply choosing to sue the most successful SaaS companies. I knew things were getting bad at MS, but I didn't realize they were this bad.

Maascamp 16y ago
I'm sorry but that's a pretty weak argument. So does that mean that any company with patents should just suck it up if someone infringes instead of defending their IP? Regardless of what you think of the validity of patent, it was granted and MS has a right to defend it. If you put in time doing research and then spend time and money patenting that research because you believe it to be innovative (subjective), would you just suck it up and "try to make your own software better" if someone copied your work?
- flatline 16y ago
  Among all the companies out there that are arguably violating these patents, they choose to go after a high profile, successful, primarily online company who has been in business using these technologies for years. This is highly selective and to me indicates that the GP's point probably has some validity. Can anyone really argue that Salesforce of all companies has somehow infringed on Microsoft's IP? If they had been enforcing these patents earlier on and enforcing them uniformly, it would have seemed much less of a patent-troll style maneuver.
  - smallblacksun 16y ago
    If they had instead gone after lots of small companies, you would be complaining that they were abusing the little guy who couldn't defend himself. This is not patent trolling because Microsoft actually uses these patents in their software.

anujseth 16y ago

I don't care if I get down voted to oblivion for this, but I can't take the assholery anymore. When Apple et. al. file such suits its strategic, when they arbitrarily try to kill stuff its also strategic and jobs being jesus.Microsoft so much as moves a muscle and Apple trolls that have infested todays 'new' media and companies such as the above swing into action. Fucking 37 signals, what a sad day indeed.

anujseth 16y ago
My karma goes down 4 then up 4, and is pretty much stagnant. I should make a clarification here, I do not support patents at all. The above rant is merely directed towards double standards.
mtarnovan 16y ago
I agree with your observation. Also I think some of the posters here of HN are trying to hard to play devil's advocate based on how much they like that particular devil.
ElliotH 16y ago
To be fair I think we can all agree that Microsoft's use of these patents is strategic. Lots of things can be strategic. The question is whether or not its right - which, since software patents are involved, a lot of people don't think it is. (On the whole I don't think Apple have been doing so fantastically in the tech press with their current closed platform anyway.)

btilly 16y ago

Given the state of the patent system, I think that these are not horrible patents. Sure, I don't like them either. But remember that the patent system is supposed to protect things that are obvious after you've seen them, but which aren't that easy to think up. We've all seen the technologies, so of course they are obvious to us now. But were they obvious at the time? Take, for instance, patent #8, "Method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer" (see http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,845,077.PN.&OS=PN/5,845,077&RS=PN/5,845,077 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec... for details). It covers a system for having lots of machines keep themselves up to date with a central repository. Obvious, right? We can all think of a ton of examples. For instance Debian's apt fits virtually all of the claims except the ones involving payment. (For some reason Debian doesn't worry about that much. :-) ) But look when it was filed. November 27, 1995. That's well before apt. In fact it was the same year that Debian first released dselect. I don't know if dselect was advanced enough back then match the patent. If so then that is prior art and I'd suggest that Salesforce's lawyers look carefully at it. If it is not, then finding prior art may be a challenge. People today are used to subscription-based software distribution. But pick up Founders at Work and read the interview with Arthur van Hoff about Marimba, which was founded in 1996 (after the patent was filed) and was in the business of subscription-based software with automatic updates. He talks a bit about how new the idea was, and how it was difficult to get people to try it. That tells me that, at the time and with the way people were used to working, this technology really was new and innovative. Now I really, really hope that someone can find prior art and smack Microsoft down. I don't want this kind of patent to threaten software I use. But as far as patents go, this seems relatively good. (The fact that it is still bad is an argument against software patents in general, and not this particular patent.)

angelbob 16y ago
I was at Carnegie Mellon University in 1995. The machines in the computer clusters there downloaded a central image from central servers to overwrite the machine, regularly. I imagine it used rsync, though I don't know for sure. This had definitely been implemented and in regular use before 1995.

sbov 16y ago

Some of these patents were assigned in the mid-90's. Where has Microsoft been all this time? Patents should have an "enforce it or lose it" clause. Some of these may have been novel at the time of filing. However, after some time of being unenforced, they become standard practice in an industry. Then after 10 years of standard use some company comes out of nowhere and tries to enforce it? Too late.

smallblacksun 16y ago
Trademarks have the "enforce it or lose it" clause. This causes companies to be forced to go after all non-commercial use of the trademark, causing hassles for the people they are going after, and money for the company. That doesn't necessarily mean that your idea is a bad one, jut that you have to watch out for unintended consequences.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  It would have the awesome intended consequence of exposing how patents actually hinder innovation, not improve it.

motters 16y ago

I say this with some reluctance because I've written quite a lot of Mono/C# code, but to me this absolutely proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the software patent threat from Microsoft is real and not just some abstract academic debate. I think I'll be limiting or scaling down my use of .NET on linux in future as a consequence.

WalterGR 16y ago
> to me this absolutely proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the software patent threat from Microsoft is real and not just some abstract academic debate. Honest question follows after the quote. http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/05/microsoft_sues_salesforcecom_alleging_patent_infringement.html http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/05/microsoft_sues_sale... > "Although Microsoft has been a frequent target of patent-infringement claims itself, it's only the fourth time in its history that the Redmond company has filed a patent-infringement suit against a competitor, and the company has said in the past that it views such actions as a last resort when it has been unable to negotiate a licensing deal." Do you use technology provided by (just throwing out names) Google, Apple, HTC, Oracle, etc.? Have they proven to be less litigious? If you do use technology provided by other companies, are you also planning on scaling back their use?
- motters 16y ago
  I'm thinking in terms of programming languages rather than products from particular companies. Recently I've gone back to using C/C++ and might also start using Python. As far as I know there are no software patent issues with those languages.

raphar 16y ago

I've some questions about "A method for providing a web page having an embedded menu to a web browser and for displaying the web page to a user of the web browser are provided." The original text: A request for a web page is received from a web browser In response to the request, a web page and an applet associated with the web page are packaged for transmission to the web browser. The web page and the applet are then transmitted to and downloaded by the web browser. When the web page is displayed and the applet is executed by the web browser, the applet creates and manages an embedded menu in the displayed web page under control of the applet . This embedded menu provides a user of the web browser with a plurality of links through one action in the displayed web page An applet? Does Salesforce use an applet to draw its menus? (that's so '90s). Is the patent valid if Salesforces does its menus only with HTML? ADDED: May Flash be considered as an applet?

deleted 16y ago
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jcromartie 16y ago
Based on the patent claims, they are talking about absolutely nothing more than a Java applet with a menu in it. This is insane.

tzs 16y ago

Is it really hacker news every time some idiot writes yet another inaccurate article about a patent lawsuit?

lionshare 16y ago

For the record: This time 37 signals is perfectly right. These patents are absurd. The most is "objects for keeping settings". Really, they just covered everything out there, any software, any device. The court should dismiss these patents.