New lawsuit against Microsoft restores equilibrium
For years now there’s been a familiar pattern to Microsoft and the law: a company sues Microsoft, Microsoft sues them back, and then there’s a battle of staying power while the lawyers’ meter keeps ticking. So when Microsoft recently initiated a patent suit from scratch, things just didn’t feel right.
The Microsoft countersuit phenomenon is really an inevitable effect of the company’s size. It’s got so many patents on file that if you bring a case against Microsoft, the chances are they’ll find something you do that they can credibly claim violates their own patents: credibly enough, that is, to avoid getting laughed out of court right away.
Last month saw something of a rarity as Microsoft brought a patent suit against a company pro-actively, thought to be only the fourth time that’s happened. The target was Salesforce.com, a company which offers online software, the idea being that businesses can use these applications without the need for traditional Windows programs on their desktop.
Microsoft claims Salesforce breached nine patents but, without prejudging a court’s verdict, those claims seem a little ambitious. The way the patents are worded, Microsoft appears to be claiming the exclusive right to use features such as menus on web pages, or even toolbars.
Salesforce’s response only covers five of its patents, but they are equally bombastic: if its arguments are to be believed, both the .Net development system and the error reporting system in Windows 7 breach Salesforce patents. The suit takes a kitchen sink approach to resitution: it wants unspecified damages, those damages to be tripled for wilful infringement, and an injunction against Microsoft using the relevant technologies.
Of course, taken in isolation these seem pretty ambitious demands. For example, it’s a bit much to claim Microsoft was willfully breaching the patents considering Salesforce presumably didn’t know it was going on until recently — unless of course the suit is nothing but a yah-boo response to Microsoft’s own suit.
Then again, as the saying goes, what comes around…
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