Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Software patents are bad

It's not often I feel sorry for Microsoft, but in this case I do. They lost a lawsuit against some one man company called Eolas in the US which had filed some patent relating to the accessing of embedded active content in webpages and got huge damages awarded against them.

Frankly this sort of thing is ridiculous - how someone is even allowed to patent stuff like this is ridiculous.

(MS are releasing a big security update today - which includes modifying IE/ActiveX behaviour in such a way as to evade the patent.)

See:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5071656.stm

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1944867,00.asp

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