throwawaykf1

Actually, small players like startups and independent developers are the least likely to get hit with patent problems. It's only because the few trolls that sued a lot of small guys got a huge amount of publicity that it seems like a big problem. These trolls are abusing the cost asymmetry of patent litigation, and something needs to be done about this, but they are still relatively rare. Unfortunately, this problem shows signs of growing fast.

You realize all of Microsoft's patents are public, right? That's the deal with patents: you publish them in order to get a temporary monopoly. There is little significant data that B&N could threaten to "disclose" that you couldn't find by doing an assignee search on the USPTO website. They may have patents assigned to shell companies, IV-style, but their negotiation power comes from having a very visible humongous portfolio, and using shell companies would just make it less visible.

Maybe B&N could "disclose" what patents MS is licensing related to Android, but you could make a good guess of those too by filtering the previous list of patents for keywords related to mobile and operating systems.

B&N had jack squat on MS in this lawsuit, which is why they made a big noise about antitrust, which of course went nowhere. I suspect you've been getting your info from Groklaw, which could explain a lot of misconceptions around here.

> Something that makes very little sense.

How does a content deal not make sense in today's world? It is exactly to prevent the "erosion" of their ecosystem. The ecosystem today is so much more than PCs. They don't want people to go somewhere else (like, say, iTunes or Amazon) to get their content, because that's a very strong lure to join another ecosystem. Every major player is out there making content deals to tie into their ecosystem, and MS is right up there with them... Except ebooks was the glaring hole in their content story. And it's not going to be attached to just Windows, but to their phone, tablet and cloud offerings too.

As to the strength of their patents, you just gotta look at who is getting injunctions and who is getting paid in the "smartphone wars". Nobody's getting any lasting injunctions, but MS has been getting paid all over. (OK, Apple got that one big win over Samsung, but it's still up in the air.)

Just for some disclosure, I've been tangentially involved in patent licensing efforts for a small firm. It is very, very difficult to get any licensing from big firms, who would prefer to role the dice in court if there's the slightest chance they can win or out-lawyer you. Given that, I find it impressive how many royalty-bearing licenses MS has managed to get in the past few years. Including, of all things, Foxconn.

No, most of EU as well. See this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5679867

It's not "ambiguity of English" -- all (usefulsoftware does have a technical effect. Or would you say software should be excluded from the "tech industry" and people should stop calling themselves "software engineers"? This is why it is mostly patentable in the EU.

About the only thing the "technical effect" limitation prevents is business method patents.

Misconceptions abound. You cannot patent "operating system software" because it is an abstract concept with no embodiment, like "flying car" or "hyperdrive spaceship".

And people did patent "media player with music in the cloud", or more accurately, various aspects thereof. Spotify famously got sued over a patent on a specific way to do DRM for streaming music, for example, when they entered the US. They just licensed it and moved on. The streaming music industry is growing all the time, despite tons of patents in the field.

Conversely, if you think weak patent rights means unbounded innovation, I haven't seen any particularly impressive tech originating in China or India.

Things are patented left and right in the US, and always have been, and I don't see innovation here slowing down any. And it would not be surprising if people understood the realities of patents instead of believing what tech media tells them (insert reference to pg's "Submarine" essay here).

Way to address the points. Ad homs and downvotes are the only recourse you have left, I suppose.

Wow, the MS hate really turns people stupid. Here's another way to look at it:

Amazon spends many billions and almost a decade creating a real e-book market. Apple spends many billions and almost a decade building the first "modern" tablet, and leverage their tablet dominance to create the first real competitor to Amazon's ebook monopsony. Along the way they fight off an antitrust lawsuit. Google spends billions and many years building specialized scanning infrastructure to scan every dead tree book in existence so they can index them. Along the way they fight off a lawsuit from the Authors Guild. And I'm still not sure if they have significant monetization from that.

Microsoft, which has NO ebook story for their struggling mobile ecosystem, swoops in and suddenly becomes a player in the ebook market for 1.3 billion in one year.

And people like you, mtgx and rbannfy think this means MS patents were weak. Why don't you think about how much this was really worth to Microsoft and how much they actually paid for it? That might lead you to adjust your views about various aspects of "M$" besides just their patents, but I won't hold my breath.