Microsoft will get rid of the EU antitrust with patents

Summary:

Brad Smith, one of the top Microsoft lawyer, mentioned the patent strategy of the firm in order to license their patented protocols to competitors.

Microsoft will get rid of the EU antitrust with patents

zoobab 18 Sep 2007 09:22

Here is a quote of Brad Smith after the announce of the EU ECJ decision yesterday:

In addition, there's obviously a lot of work that has gone into our efforts to comply with the Commission's terms with respect to communications protocols and our duty to license them, a duty that obviously was reaffirmed by the court's decision today. We've made a lot of progress in that regard, and yet we all have to acknowledge that there are some issues that do remain open.

Don't worry, Microsoft will find a way to license their patented protocols in order to exclude Open Source competitors, such as Samba. Here what a Samba developer said yesterday in an FSFE press release "A triumph for freedom of choice and competition" (a triumph for competition has still to be seen):

Volker Lendecke of the Samba Team: "Now that the court has decided, we will be watching closely what the exact licensing terms for the interoperability information are. It will be very important to make sure that the information is usable in Free Software, otherwise the great success the Commission has achieved here is severely harmed. Samba is one of the most important players in the workgroup server market, the market in which the Commission wanted to restore competition."

And another quote of Brad Smith on the Microsoft's plans reported in Bloomberg:

"We will take new steps to broaden our interoperability partnerships with others in our industry,'' he said. "We look forward to taking those steps not in the months and years but in the weeks to come.''

I am reading it like this:

"We will take new steps to broaden our patent partnerships with others in our industry,'' he said.

If it is like the Novell deal on patents, it will be used to split the Linux community between those who pay the patent license and those who don't.

Re: Microsoft will get rid of the EU antitrust with patents

zoobab 18 Sep 2007 09:31

Also in SeattleTimes:

Microsoft has been working with the European Commission on disclosing so-called server communications protocols for three years, but disputes remain about how much it must share and under what financial terms.

Did they mean patent royalties? I don't any other mechanism to force competitors to be Microsoft's slaves.

They also says that Microsoft is requesting a patent tax of 1% on sales of competitors:

The company currently charges 1 percent of sales of products that make use of its technologies.

I would bet on the fact that Microsoft will manage a deal on royalties with the Commission, and that nobody will hear about it.

Last edited on 18 Sep 2007 09:38 by zoobab Show more

Re: Microsoft will get rid of the EU antitrust with patents

zoobab 18 Sep 2007 14:28

I also found this in an article titled 'Microsoft won't dance with Samba' published by ZDNet in 2005:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39185562,00.htm

"The conditions are unreasonable and discriminate against free software — it is impossible for a product under GPL to agree to this licence," said Piano.

And also:

"The agreement requires a per-copy licence — any time you sell a product you must pay a royalty," said Piano. "This prevents Samba from accessing the scheme as they have no way to control the number of copies distributed and don't know how many copies have been distributed."

Last edited on 18 Sep 2007 14:29 by zoobab Show more

Re: Microsoft will get rid of the EU antitrust with patents

zoobab 20 Sep 2007 14:16

Another similar one from an article in CRN written in 2002:

"We set up a program that was very straightforward and relies on industry-standard practices when it comes to licensing intellectual property but, of course, there will be questions," said Jim Desler, a Microsoft legal spokesman. "The consent decree is relatively clear, but there will always be questions in terms of interpretation." He claims the terms of the agreement and the royalties are more than fair. "Royalties are reasonable and, considering the billions of dollars we put in developing this intellectual property, they're very fair," Desler added. "In making this agreement, the DOJ recognized we have an obligation to disclose technical information and we have the right to charge reasonable, nondiscriminatory fees for our intellectual property, and we set something up that's very fair."

Last edited on 20 Sep 2007 14:17 by zoobab Show more

Re: Microsoft will get rid of the EU antitrust with patents

Anonymous (213.193.162.x) 20 Sep 2007 13:01

From Groklaw:

Carlo Piana: Yeah, already this is an appeal against the Commission's decision, so the extent to which the court could dig into the fact-finding of the Commission is relatively narrow. Now, the appeals on this decision are going to be strictly on the point of law, so, if the court has cited incorrectly the case law, or has done something manifestly wrong, or stuff like this, so the scope of the appeal is very narrow now. So I don't think they will have much leverage on what's going on, and I don't think Microsoft will count very much on the Court of Justice. They will try to squeeze out… there are ways they can squeeze out of the decision. For instance, they are still able to claim that their quote-unquote "intellectual property rights" must be take into consideration when, for instance, handing out information to Samba because they say "No, we cannot do it because we will give away our secret and our secret is intellectual property and so, sorry, we cannot". This one way, I anticipate, they will work very hard.