James Taylor, a Texas inventor, has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas against Microsoft, claiming that the software giant's Windows operating systems, Office applications, and SQL database technology violate his patent entitled "Post compile optimizer for linkable object code." The patent was awarded to Taylor in 1995 and describes "a system for processing a complete object code data set, to be linked into an executable program," according to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records. When reached at his home in Carrollton, Taylor, who filed the lawsuit without the aid of an attorney, declined to specify which aspects of Microsoft’s products he believes violate his patent. He is seeking unspecified damages. Microsoft has yet to file a response in the case.
Microsoft has been lobbying for patent reforms that would make it more difficult for inventors to obtain patents on what the company believes are dubious or vaguely described innovations.
News source: InformationWeek
Microsoft has been lobbying for patent reforms that would make it more difficult for inventors to obtain patents on what the company believes are dubious or vaguely described innovations.
News source: InformationWeek
Seriously, vague patents are a real problem. Kinda works against compitition. The guy comes up with something, patents it with a vague discription and now anyone that comes up with a competing way of doing the same thing is now in violation of his patent.
And Microsoft has probably more spare cash laying around for hiring some attorneys than he does... Poor guy... lol...
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x...beh(VS.80).aspx
One of the best compiler features ever! Good luck tiny minds.
BTW: There is a ton of academic 'prior art' in this space. The patent will be trivially overturned. Like, oh... say: Cross-module optimizations: Its implementation and benefits
MI Himelstein, FC Chow, K Enderby - Proceedings of the Summer 1987 USENIX Conference, 1987
How about .OVL / .OVR files that were used for DOS applications? I remember those from ten years before this blagger filed his stupid patent.
A good point, but overlay files were just 'DLLs for DOS'. Since they predate DLLs - that's a weird thing to say though.
This patent is around actually running the 'opimizaiton' phase of building software at link time instead of at compile time file-by-file.
Again - The guy may have made the patent before MS implemented it -but there is a ton of prior-art academic papers on doing it.
Not so. Patents can be obtained on concept alone. Just the mere scribblings on a napkin can be submitted for a patent. You don't need a working product to obtain a patent.
However, the lawyer part comes in to fully explain the process of the concept, down to the finest detail. Without an in depth explanation of the patented concept, there's always a way to get around the patent.
I say Microsoft should sue the pants off these losers. On what grounds I don't know, but these morons only need some BS vague area that Microsoft has possibly infringed on to receive millions in extortion funds, maybe there's something they can extort back from them.
The article mentioned this patent troll filed in East Texas, so chances are, it's Marshall!
That said, research in the field has existed next to forever... until recently machines didn't have enough RAM to make implementation feasible.
There is a scam artist born every 10 seconds. And a lawyer ever 9!
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