Intersting article...I knew that MS had quite alot of things going for them

Nice PR fluff on Microsoft's part but the real story is that companies like Microsoft get lots of patents which tend to be of low significance. It is independent inventors who with a handful of patents produce inventions which lead to whole new industries. Examples are the TV, Laser, MRI, the pacemaker and countless other inventions. So Bill Gates decides to have 3000 patents a year and low and behold he gets 3000 patents, but those patents are for the most part nice trophies which sit on a shelf or hang on a wall but are otherwise of little use.

Meanwhile Microsoft has forty pending lawsuits becausse countless inventors ghave caught Microsoft grubby fingers in their patent cookie jars. Those forty case represent a small percentage of inventor's cases, because the majority of inventors are used, abused, and then crushed.

But a few, really a very small percentage of wronged inventors manage to get justice. And when they do patent pirates howl about how they are being abused. They spend massive amounts on vicious public relations campaigns which characterize their victims as bad players.

And they advance legislation which will facilate their theft of others property as "reform".

So called patent reform is not really reform. It is a set of tools which will create a host of new litigation opportunities and otherwise raise the cost of entry to the use the patent system by about two orders of magnitude.
Perhaps we should go over the big picture of what the patent pirates have in mind for our patent system. Virtually every change does one or more of the following.

1) Increases the costs of small entity patent holders, often by at least an order of magnitude.

2) s***s costs from large corporate infringers to the small entity.

3) Opens new causes for large entities to litigate.

4) Opens our patent system to a multitude of patent system abuses common in Japan which very much favors big companies.

5) Delays the possibility of start-ups obtaining investment capital by effectively increasing pendency.

6) Increases the power and potential abuse of such power by the USPTO which has become increasingly politicized.

7) Lowers the potential recovery for a patentee by at least one to two orders of magnitude.

8) It will not decrease the role of attorneys or litigation, but rather will increase their role and legal expenses in a multitude of ways.

9) Will lead to much higher filing rates for patents which will further bog down the USPTO.

If you care to call me I would be happy to field your questions about patent reform and other aspects of intellectual property from the perspective of small business. I can also give you names of other inventors and top IP law experts who very much oppose patent pirates agenda for the patent system.

===

PIAUSA.org is a decade old organization which represents the interests of inventors and innovation driven small and medium sized business. We have a different perspective which will add balance to coverage of patent litigation, public policy, and legislative issues. Journalists covering such issues would benefit from our input. We have the ability to bring journalists in contact with high end inventor-entrepreneurs and top intellectual property experts.

Examples of areas of our expertise include the Blackberry litigation and patent reform.

Call or write for on record comments.

http://www.piausa.org/general_info/about_us/

Ronald J Riley, President
Professional Inventors Alliance
www.PIAUSA.org
RJR (at) PIAUSA.org
Change "at" to @
RJR Direct # (202) 318-1595

25,000 yes.. but how many have expired? You can be a patent holder of the buggy whip.. doesnt mean its still in effect.

Yay!, Microsoft got another patent. Give ema cookie.

How about that Eolas patent... that's a gem.

Don't install update 912945, unless you want to click all over your flash embeds...

At some point in 2006 you will likely have no choice about the 'Eolas update': it will become required, not optional.

Generally, i don't cosider it a patent if you took someone's idea and then made a few changes and try to pass it as your own.

Then you, unfortunately, are overqualified to be a patent clerk. Please apply elsewhere.

say what?bill gates stole the code to dos years ago .he then proceeded to steal the graphical user interface from apple so where do we get 5000 patents ?

MS-DOS was actually licensed from SCP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS

The GUI was originally created by Xerox PARC and Apple used their ideas and Microsoft later built on what Apple did. If you think MS stole it I would assume you'd think Apple also stole it, although they stole it first.

And don't forget that SCP cloned CP/M to create DOS. The reality is that Digital Research (owner of CP/M) was not responding to the market demand for 16-bit CPU support.

In every industry, it's completely normal for competitors to build upon each other's work. That's called progress. When is the last time you heard Ford Motor Company grumble that General Motors can't innovate and had to "steal" Henry Ford's idea? Who really cares which company "invented" shampoo+conditioner in one bottle? Many years ago, no such product existed and today, many such products exist, but there is no Slashdot equivalent in the hair care industry where people can't stop whining about an idea being "stolen."

Of course, there is still such a thing as stealing an idea. It's clearly wrong to hack in or break in to a competitor, grab copies of new product plans which are explicitly designated as confidential, and then rush your own version of the product to market without doing any of your own R&D and without making any improvements upon someone else's idea.

Exactly where to draw the line can be complicated, especially when you start getting into scenarios like reverse engineering, hiring away key employees from a competitor, etc. But as long as we're talking about cases where one product merely "inspires" another (as with Mac vs. Windows, where the functional and cosmetic similarities have always been superficial, or with DOS vs. CP/M where the API and data structure similarities were implemented with all new code plus obvious refinements and enhancements), there's little justification for calling these technologies "stolen."

Patents are destroying any free-minded creativity that is left in this world...

Patents by themselves are a good thing. Patent extensions and patent clerks who have no clue how to test them are not.

25,000 ????

Wow, IBM are nothing but a bunch of greddy bas-t-a-r-d-s ....

5,000 .... come on MS. you can do better

Obtaining a patent is far from greedy. They, along with copyrights, help protect and secure unique intellectual properties.

Of course, you have to ignore the fact that both systems, copyright and patent, are outdated to the point of ridiculousness and riddeen with abuse and corruption.

Other than that, though..."They're Grrrr-eat!"

What was their latest patent?

An AJAX implementation to automatically trigger a portajohn flush while still maintaining state between postbacks?