Microsoft Won't Assert Web Services Patents

Andy Updegrove writes, "Microsoft has just posted the text of a new promise not to assert its patents with respect to 35 listed Web Services standards. The promise is similar to the covenant not to assert patents that it issued last year with respect to its Office 2003 XML Reference Schema, with two important improvements intended to make it more clearly compatible with open source licensing. Those changes are to add an explicit promise not to assert any relevant patents against anyone in the distribution chain of a product, from the original vendor through to the end user; and to clarify that the promise covers a partial as well as a full implementation of a standard. It's all part of a recent wave of such pledges made by companies such as IBM, Nokia, and Oracle, and a significant shift in how Microsoft is dealing with open standards."

Lets be sure to praise em for doing good

[jmorris42]

Can't see any downside to them making such a pledge, so lets all be sure to be unreserved in our praise. Who knows, maybe we can encourage more of the same sort of behaviour. And not only just from Microsoft, lots of patents out there held by lots of companies, many of them potential mortal threat.

Yea Microsoft!

See, my tongue didn't burst into flames or anything. :)

Why not?

[VanessaE]

Why keep the patents if you're not going to use them? It's just blatent patent hogging.

As much as software patents may be a horrible idea, and as much as people here generally hate Microsoft, maybe this is a *good* step? The company has pledged publicly that they won't actually assert their patent rights... and since these are patents we're talking about, it means that noone else can either.

Maybe it's just the sort of protection that the open source movement needs so that we *can* innovate without having to jump through a bunch of hoops or worry about facing legal action?

Good, positive attitude

[mangu]

Microsoft's position is that of someone in a warehouse full of gasoline cans. Let's not start throwing lighted matches around.

It's a positive step, because it shows they can act rationally, having had their share of trouble from software patents. It also goes to show that, if software patents are bad for Microsoft, they should be considered generally as a Bad Thing for the software business in general.

There is a general attitude in Washington, sponsored by the ??AA, that any law that creates more "intellectual property" is good for business. Microsoft is sending a message that it ain't necessarily so.

Re:motivation behind this?

[rifftide]

Historically, Microsoft has not been a big proponent of winning through patents, either by preventing competition or extorting usage fees. They like to win in other ways. The big software houses see Web Services as the key towards the next great era of business software, and they all like their chances. But that only happens if they can avoid getting stuck in a mire of standards dueling and IP litigation (see: Blu-Ray/HD DVD).

Notice that the pledge includes the standard defensive measure - if you sue Microsoft for infringing one of your patents, it's void. But it was carefully crafted so that only Microsoft code used to directly implement one of the specifications is covered by the defensive clause - not all of Windows and MS Office for example. That's perhaps the most impressive part of the pledge.

Re:Lets be sure to praise em for doing good

[TekPolitik]

The question of whether it raises an estoppel (presumably, here, a promissory estoppel) depends on, among other things, the degree to which the reliance by the unlicensed user of the patent on the pledge to not enforce the patent is "reasonable", as well as consideration of whether injustice can be avoided by any other means than enforcing the promise.

As a statement of the law this is spot on, but it would have been more helpful to the person asking the question if you had applied it to a sample set of facts.

Note the requirement for reliance - this means you must at least have been aware of the promise. You (or at a minimum somebody you claim through) must have then acted, in reliance on the promise, in such a way that you would suffer a detriment if Microsoft resiled from the promise.

If, being aware of the promise, you produce any non-trivial amount of work depending on the patents, chances are that a court is going to be willing to impose a promissory estoppel. In the case of GPL software, somebody, somewhere is going to rely on this promise, and a consequence of this is there will be GPL software out there that effectively gives you something that should support an estoppel. It's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for Microsoft to renege on this.

It is fairly safe* to take them at their word here.

* - usual disclaimers apply.

Re:Dialog

[CCFreak2K]

...go play nice with the Sun...

Sometimes I think the only reason Sun Solaris is open is because they'd be dead if not. I also think the only reason OpenOffice is open is because Microsoft Office isn't.

Protection against patent suits

[I'm Don Giovanni]

A good reason to patent something you "invented", even if you have no intention of enforcing them yourself, is to prevent some small company that does nothing *but* patent from patenting your "invention" and coming after you. Even if you had "prior art", the case costs money to actually win, so you might feel compelled to settle to make it go away.

Microsoft normally doesn't sue over patents, but they're the biggest target for these patent-specialist companies (since MS has the most money, and potential suers think MS would be more likely to settle since they can do it without missing the cash), so they patent their stuff for their own protection.

Is this not just marketing?

[FritzSolms]

The implicit message conveyed is that Microsoft has patented all these standards, giving the impression that all these public web standards are thanks to the innovation of Microsoft. They have contributed to ssome of these (most notably the SOAP specification), but web services are not just due to Microsoft. Furthermore, having contributed to SOAP as a public standard in a W3C process should certainly have prevented them from being able to patent it (or am I wrong?). SOAP is, however, included in the list of 35 software patents which are not enforces??? I would think that the W3C would have a policy that if a company contributes to a public standard and then patents it, that that company would be prevented from participating in any other community processes. Does anyone have the actual list of patents?