MICROSOFT LOST BADLY at a pre-trial hearing on patents litigation earlier this month, according to articles appearing in the Sacramento Bee and Fortune. At issue in what Fortune calls "the biggest patent case ever" is Microsoft's allegedly wide-ranging infringement of about a dozen patents held by InterTrust on digital rights management, trusted computing, and e-commerce technologies.
InterTrust developed its patents in the '90s, planning to participate in big markets for secure digital content transactions and related payment streams. However, it alleges that Microsoft stole its technology without compensation, giving it away in many products, beggaring InterTrust. On its website, InterTrust lists 33 Volish products that it claims infringe on its patents, including Windows XP, Office (plus component products), Windows Media Player, everything .Net, Xbox and miscellaneous others.
During the Internet bubble, InterTrust had over 450 employees and sold a catalogue of hardware and software products for various secure services. Now it has 39 employees, a sheaf of patents, and a promising lawsuit. The company was taken private earlier this year for $453 million -- most of it put up by Sony and Philips. If its litigation against Microsoft is successful, one imagines it will then go after the Big Media companies, like AOL/Time-Warner, Vivendi and Bertelsmann, then e-commerce firms.
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News source: The Inq
InterTrust developed its patents in the '90s, planning to participate in big markets for secure digital content transactions and related payment streams. However, it alleges that Microsoft stole its technology without compensation, giving it away in many products, beggaring InterTrust. On its website, InterTrust lists 33 Volish products that it claims infringe on its patents, including Windows XP, Office (plus component products), Windows Media Player, everything .Net, Xbox and miscellaneous others.
During the Internet bubble, InterTrust had over 450 employees and sold a catalogue of hardware and software products for various secure services. Now it has 39 employees, a sheaf of patents, and a promising lawsuit. The company was taken private earlier this year for $453 million -- most of it put up by Sony and Philips. If its litigation against Microsoft is successful, one imagines it will then go after the Big Media companies, like AOL/Time-Warner, Vivendi and Bertelsmann, then e-commerce firms.
View: The full story News source: The Inq
Bugfixes
- Unnecessary taskbar button added for Access XP
- Excel XP issues
- PowerPoint XP issues
- Passing arguments to script files (.vbs, etc) doesn't work with UltraMon shortcuts and hotkeys
- CALnet doesn't work correctly or not at all when started using an UltraMon shortcut
- Display settings: identify monitors doesn't work correctly if mirroring is active
- Nothing happens when trying to open advanced display settings for a monitor which has no advanced settings
- No custom ATI tabs added to advanced display settings for some ATI video cards
- UltraEdit context menus vanish immediately when mirroring is active
- When stored settings for a monitor are no longer valid, mirror settings dialog crashes and mirroring doesn't work correctly
- Setup: when manually entering an installation directory without using the Browse dialog, UltraMon gets installed in the default directory on Windows 98/Me
- Setup: issues with the German version
so let me get this straight, you don't go after all of them at once, just the one with the most money, i see how the system works, it's not justice you care about or even all of your money just whoever has the most.
no it's not all about money lol...anyway, my prediction is that this case will go nowhere just like all the others, i'm so tired of people predicting the end of MS when cases like this show up, there have been plenty of others with stronger cases than this that have went nowhere
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