La difesa contro il complaint di Microsoft contro Nook per violazione di brevetti evidenzia come questa possa essere una mossa di Microsoft per assumere il controllo di Android. I brevetti di Microsoft sono talmente banali e di vasta portata che l'esito del caso puņ avere conseguenze serie per lo sviluppo futuro di tutto il FOSS.



"The ’372, ’780, ’522, ’551, and ’233 patents, however, do not cover, claim, or disclose the AndroidTM Operating System. Instead, they claim five insubstantial and trivial features, including what Microsoft has itself described as (1) the “display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster,” (2) the “superimpos[ing of] download status on top of the downloading content”, (3) “easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs”; (4) “[p]rovid[ing] users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document”; and (5) “[p]ermit[ing] users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection.” The NookTM and Nook ColorTM do not infringe any valid claim of the ’372, ’780, ’522, ’551, and ’233 patents and none of these trivial features serve as a basis for customer demand for these products. The subject matter embraced by the ’372, ’780, ’522, ’551, and ’233 patents was not new and would have been highly obvious at the time those patents were filed."

"(Unenforceability Due to Patent Misuse) [...]

1. Microsoft’s claims of infringement of the ’372, ’780, ’522, ’551, and ’233 patents against Barnes & Noble are barred by the doctrine of patent misuse.

2. Microsoft has impermissibly broadened the physical scope of the ’372, ’780, ’522, ’551, and ’233 patents in furtherance of a plan or scheme orchestrated by Microsoft and its agents to eliminate or marginalize the competition to Microsoft’s own Windows Phone 7 mobile device operating system posed by the open source AndroidTM Operating System and other open source operating systems. As part of this scheme, Microsoft has asserted patents that extend only to arbitrary, outmoded, or non-essential design features, but uses these patents to demand that every manufacturer of an Android-based mobile device take a license from Microsoft and pay exorbitant licensing fees or face protracted and expensive patent infringement litigation. The asserted patents do not have a lawful scope sufficient to control the AndroidTM Operating System as Microsoft is attempting to do, and Microsoft’s misuse of these patents directly harms both competition for and consumers of all eReaders, smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile electronic devices.

Microsoft’s Attempt to Control the Android Operating System

3. Microsoft did not invent, research, develop, or make available to the public mobile devices employing the AndroidTM Operating System and other open source operating systems, but nevertheless seeks to dominate something it did not invent. On information and belief, Microsoft intends to take and has taken definite steps towards making competing operating systems such as the AndroidTM Operating System unusable and unattractive to both consumers and device manufacturers through exorbitant license fees and absurd licensing restrictions that bear no relation to the scope and subject matter of its own patents.

<http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110427052238659>

Ciao,
Paolo