Only yesterday, Microsoft was shoving advertisements for Edge in my face and proudly proclaiming it was the most secure browser... This claims look ridiculous this morning. Looks like an epic hack, seriously cool.

Microsoft paid Stac Electronics triple damages for willful infringement in the Stacker case.

Unwinding with some Microsofties at a conference, one of the folk claimed to be fairly close to the technical end of it and said: "we thought we were okay because the patent was very specific about the data structures and the algorithms applied to them. We didn't replicate the data structures at all because there better alternatives. The court didn't care". (Actually Microsoft's will-we-won't-we license it dance was pretty despicable, got a deserved kicking IMHO).

The advice Microsoft is giving here is pretty standard in large engineering companies. Yes, this behavior means patents are largely a self-serving scheme that gives employees a small bonus and makes jobs for corporate legal departments. Yaboo, patents suck...

To compound my cynical view of patents, I recently discovered a colleague had been granted a patent in an area I'd been working on independently and I could not make head nor tail of it because of the lawyer translation process. I went and spoke with my colleague and we had no problem having a technical discussion about the problem and our not so different approaches. Why, why, why, do we put up with the pretense?