Posted on 06/09/2005 3:54:28 AM PDT by Salo
Microsoft has been found guilty of patent infringement and ordered to pay a Guatamalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado almost $9m in damages.
The US District Court of Central California court ruled that Microsoft had infringed on his intellectual property and ordered it to pay him $8.96m.
This figure relates to software sold between March 1997 and July 2003 - Judge David Carter may review this figure to include software sold since 2003, according to Reuters. Damages are far lower than the $500m claimed for because the jury rejected nine out of ten claims made by Amado.
Microsoft expressed disappointment at the verdict but welcomed the rejection of Amado's huge damages claim. The company said its engineers started work on the data transfer technology independently before Amado approached them.
In 1990 Carlos Armando Amado filed a patent for software which helped transfer data between Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft's Access database using a single spreadsheet. He said he tried to sell this technology to Microsoft in 1992 but they turned him down. According to Amado, Microsoft started including his software in their releases between 1995 and 2002.
Microsoft is facing patent claims over Longhorn, the next version of Windows, from networking company Alacritech. Its lawyers are also due in court with Forgent Networks which claims the software giant infringed its JPEG picture compression patent. ®
You do, if you as the end user want to be protected from legal liability when the product you're using violates the patents or copyrights of others.
While Microsoft will protect me from that liability in Excel, if Open Office violates that same patent, the liability is yours instead.
Unless you can show me that Open Office has vowed to protect their users, because the license they used to distribute it sure doesn't say they will. It says "no warranty".
And then there's Autonumbering. Ah, the many hours I've spent diagnosing Autonumbering problems...
Actually you are wrong, but if someone buys an item in 'good faith' than the buyer is not legally liable if it turns out that item was originally stolen as long as the buyer did not know it was stolen before or during the puchase, but it does up the door for the buyer to sue the seller for defruading the buyer by selling them stolen property.
I do not. This whole indemnification thing is merely FUD anyway. The ONLY reason MS is offering it is to say that they are offering it, and OSS is not.
Microsoft has never, until the SCO case came along, indemnified individual users, only business customers. I don't know of any other software company that does either. For that matter, MS and other proprietary software folk lobbied like mad to pass UCITA for the exact purpose of making sure that they never had to pay a dime to any customer except what they had paid for the software, no matter what happened, even if the software caused them millions in losses due to viruses and worms made possible by insecure MS code or any other reason. Read your EULA. Read UCITA. You'll see they disclaim everything they can think of. Then the kitchen sink.
--Pamela Jones
Well, I have some data that I've put together regarding the historical national debt that has annual totals from 1791 to the present day. The data is represented in this CSV file. Using that data, with Open Office Calc, I was able to produce this chart. Can you reproduce it while telling Excel that the first column is a year, not just a number?
I don't have a recent copy of Excel to test this on, but I know for certain that it was not possible with Word 97 or Word 2000.
Uh, you don't buy Open Office, you download it for free. Try again.
You're talking past tense, these lawsuits have now come along, and being indemnified is a very legitimate concern. I suggest you step into the present, and learn more about it from places other than Jokelaw.
No it's not. SCO tried to make it a legitimate concern, but they failed miserably. You really should try to keep up a little. What company in their right mind would sue an individual over something like this? Not only would the PR kill them, but they would not recover enough to pay the legal costs. Besides, they'd have to prove I did not acquire the software in good faith. Which they cannot.
Same priciple, you download in 'good faith'...
Besides SCO is getting hammered by IBM.
If you start adding items with their associated pricing as you go, then later need to rearrange the items in a logical order, the formulae and the fonts get messed up. There appears to be no useful method to do this, other than selective cell copy/move that takes forever. No easy and simple way to do this in Excel. It is a royal pain in the backside.
Simple, the guy from Guatemala, who deserves money for his patent being violated. If a huge company like IBM was violating his patent by using Open Office on all their computers, he would have a legitimate complaint. IBM couldn't plead ignorant, they knew there was no warranty on that software to begin with.
ROFLMAO
Without too much problem.
The issue may be the numerous types of charts Excel allows. I will conceed sometimes bloated software gets in your way.
Sounds like a database application rather than a spreadsheet app.
I've used Excel and Lotus to their limits as db apps, and except for small, flat file type dbs, I would rather use a specific database application.
Now you're stretching. I ask about suing an individual, and you come back with an example of suing IBM.
Well it made the point the end user(s) are liable. Just because your potatoes might be too small to attract a lawsuit, doesn't mean you're not criminally infringing, if Open Office does violate this same patent. Any reason it wouldn't?
OK. Point taken. However, OOo does not infringe. Check it out yourself. Here's the source code.
Even if you, personally, don't check it out, other people can, have, and will. OOo doesn'ty infringe. That's the strength and beauty of open source. It's all out in the open to prove there is no (intentional) infringing of anyone's IP. Once it's shown that some code may infringe ona patent somewhere, it's taken out immediately.
The patent was issued (5,701,400) and is not specific to any Microsoft product. He used MSFT products to demonstrate the technology, but claims it's applicable to other products and operating systems.
I wonder if this is the end of it, though. He used MSFT's code to reduce it to practice, or to develop the Invention. Thanks for the link to the patent. I shall read it at Lunch.
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