Microsoft Loses Appeal in Guatemalan Patent Claim

Spy der Mann writes "A year ago, Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado sued Microsoft for stealing an Office idea he had tried to sell them in '92. They were found to be infringing on his patent and had to pay him $9 million in damages, but they refused and appealed the decision. Today, just a year after they appealed, the Court confirmed the verdict: Microsoft loses. If that wasn't enough, the amount was raised to $65 million for continuing infringement."

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a nice summary of the first of 12 claims. Claim 1 basically outlines the method of implementation and doesn't really contain much "novelty," but you can't really make the following 11 claims describing what the program does, unless you've said you have a program. Subsequent claims describe an "expert system" for providing advice or automating decision-making. eg, Word's grammar-checker.

It may still not be all that "novel," but it's an awful lot more specific than "a program that applies AND, OR and NOT logic to database results and stores them in memory"

Convergent N-GEN and Unisys

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, all they had to do was use an NGEN based workstation and the software which allowed this, long before MS had office, between a spreadsheet and a database. Either a lazy prior art search, or them unwilling to look at long forgotten software - like Digitals all-in-one office, say. Compuware bought up a mainframe based spreadsheet, that allowed their funky and proprietary database to do similar. MS using CP/M software for prior art - well maybe not.

Re:Good

[Halo1]

My post simply summarized the first claim of the patent. The claims of a patent define the monopolies granted to the applicant. All conditions of a single claim must be fulfilled in order to infringe on that claim. So as soon as you use an if-the-else test in the way described in the first claim, you are infringing.

The abstract and description are merely used to help interpret the claim, but they have little or no legal value and do not directly define what the patent monopoly covers.

evil yet good

[m874t232]

I think the patent [uspto.gov] is of dubious validity; it's basically a patent on applying a class of welll-known technologies to relational databases instead of in-memory databases. It doesn't contain any significant intellectual insights.

Microsoft got targeted by this patent because they have money. But, in the end, that's good: Microsoft has been such a big proponent of "intellectual property protection" in recent years that they should realize that they have a lot to lose themselves from bogus patent claims, probably more than any of their competitors. Let's hope they'll change their lobbying as a result of such claims.

(Incidentally, this is a US patent case; the only thing Guatemalan about it is the inventor.)

Re:Hang on a minute

[UnknowingFool]

The history of this particular patent was that this guy was able to make Excel and Access work together in 1992. Back then they were two separate programs developed independently at MS and not really designed to interface with each other. He found a way for them to interact together and he patented it. He claims that he showed his method to MS but they didn't want to buy his patent. He claims they then used his technique anyway on subsequent versions of Excel and Access. A court has determined his claims were valid and they were reaffirmed on appeal.

Submittor Failed to RTFA

[magicchex]

FTFA:

Morrison & Foerster said it is hoping that the federal court will award Amado further damages for continuing infringement, out of an escrow account that now has more than $65 million in it.

and

In June 2005, an Orange County, Calif., jury awarded Amado $6.1 million, ruling that Microsoft's method of linking its Access database and Excel spreadsheet infringed on Amado's technology.

The original fine was 6.1m, not 9m, while the current one has NOT been set at 65m. Seems "Spy Der Mann" didn't read the short article before submitting.

Re:I have trouble with "all patents bad"

[Hymer]

That is correct. The problem right now is that patents hurt more than they help and therfore the whole idea is generally bad. If the system haven't been misused and foobared it would not have been bad.