Microsoft Gets Slammed in Yet Another Patent Suit

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Microsoft Gets Slammed in Yet Another Patent Suit — Law Blog — WSJ:

In what’s being billed as the fifth-​​largest patent award in history—and the sec­ond largest this year—a fed­eral jury in Rhode Island on Wednesday ordered Microsoft to pay $388 mil­lion to Uniloc USA Inc. and Uniloc Singapore Private Ltd. for infring­ing a soft­ware patent.

The soft­ware patent deals with unique licens­ing and reg­is­tra­tion of soft­ware, such as Microsoft’s prod­uct acti­va­tion codes (the large string of dig­its you enter to reg­is­ter your soft­ware). The patent itself says:

In broad terms, the sys­tem accord­ing to the inven­tion is designed and adapted to allow dig­i­tal data or soft­ware to run in a use mode on a plat­form if and only if an appro­pri­ate licens­ing pro­ce­dure has been fol­lowed. In par­tic­u­lar forms, the sys­tem includes means for detect­ing when parts of the plat­form on which the dig­i­tal data has been loaded has changed in part or in entirety as com­pared with the plat­form para­me­ters when the soft­ware or dig­i­tal data to be pro­tected was for exam­ple last booted or run or validly registered.

According to The Patent Prospector, the case had gone up to an appeals court ear­lier, after an ear­lier trial judge granted sum­mary judg­ment against Uniloc:

Uniloc sued Microsoft for infring­ing 5,490,216, claim­ing an anti-​​piracy soft­ware reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem. Microsoft’s prod­uct acti­va­tion sys­tem was accused. The dis­trict court judge granted sum­mary judg­ment of non-​​infringement despite con­ces­sion by Microsoft.

The appeals court sent it back down to the dis­trict court after the appeals court wrote,

Microsoft pre­sented “sev­eral alter­na­tive grounds for affirm­ing the sum­mary judg­ment beyond those which were reached by the dis­trict court. We have con­sid­ered these argu­ments and con­clude they are with­out merit.”
- Uniloc USA, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., C.A. No. 03 – 440 S, slip op. at 24 (D.R.I. Oct. 19, 2007)

Back at trial in the dis­trict court, the jury (not the judge, as some news sto­ries said) found infringe­ment by Microsoft and awarded large dam­ages to Uniloc.

I am gen­er­ally doubt­ful of soft­ware patents as a whole, but I don’t know enough about the field of prod­uct acti­va­tion to judge the nov­elty, etc. of this patent, nor do I know any­thing about Microsoft’s poten­tial infringe­ment. My gut feel­ing after read­ing through the patent (and hav­ing reg­is­tered soft­ware as a user at least), though, is that it is, at the very least, over­broad in its claims.

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