Remember back when Bill Gates said:
“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today… A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose.”
Those days are long gone, apparently. In its latest patent litigation action, Microsoft has decided to sue Salesforce.com for infringing on a bunch of patents. Basically, it looks like Microsoft went through its collection of patents to find whatever they could that Salesforce might possibly infringe on. Take a look at the list:
- 7,251,653: Method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data
- 5,742,768: System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu
- 5,644,737: Method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display
- 6,263,352: Automated web site creation using template driven generation of active server page applications
- 6,542,164: Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information
- 6,281,879: Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information (the 164 patent above looks to just be a continuation of this patent)
- 5,845,077: Method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer
- 5,941,947: System and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network
Amusingly, Microsoft and its super expensive lawyers were apparently in such a rush to file the lawsuit that they put the wrong patent number in on that second to last patent in the filing. Oops. Either way, look over that list of patents and try not to repeatedly shake your head in disbelief at the ridiculously broad nature of each and every one of those patents. And, then, since patent system defenders always remind us that it’s the claims that matter, go take a look at the claims and wonder how these patents ever got approved in the first place. Going through that list of patents, you could use them to sue an awful lot of web-based service providers.
Hopefully (though, unlikely), the Supreme Court gets around to issuing its Bilski ruling and puts software patents like these out of their misery. Here’s the full filing for anyone interested:
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