www.techdirt.com/blog.php?company=microsoft -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 10/24/2008
Last Visited: 10/24/2008
Last week, Microsoft was kind enough to invite me to sit down, one-on-one with Horacio Gutierrez, the company's VP and Deputy General Counsel in charge of intellectual property and licensing.
As you might imagine, given my views on the patent system in general, and Microsoft's gradual embrace of the patent system specifically, he and I disagreed on a fair amount.
We agreed that the patent system should be focused on encouraging innovation.
We agreed that there were abuses of the system.
From there, our views pretty much diverged, though the conversation was fun and lively.
Gutierrez began the conversation by focusing on all of the "benefits" that Microsoft sees to the patent system, which focused on all of the licensing deals that the company has done.
He positioned it by noting that the patent portfolio allows the Microsoft to get into deeper business relationships with other entities.
Specifically, he noted that in many cases what began as a patent licensing discussion eventually leads to a much more complete business relationship that increases interoperability.
He cited deals with both Sun and Novell as examples of this.
...
The fallacy that Gutierrez laid out is that these sorts of relationships and interoperability are impossible to come by without the use of that pointy stick.
That's difficult to believe.
If the relationships really are mutually beneficial, then they are likely to come about in a much more friendly manner anyway.
When I pointed out (literally) that Microsoft coming to companies with a big stick didn't seem like the friendliest of business negotiations, Gutierrez suggested that you "need" the stick to make the conversations work.
On that we disagree, and there's a pretty long history of companies entering into mutually beneficial relationships that don't necessarily involve the threat of a lawsuit or government granted monopolies on processes.
Gutierrez also pointed out that any complex product these days, by its very nature, will violate numerous patents from numerous other companies and individuals.
Thus, his argument is that we really should focus on mechanisms to avoid lawsuits to allow those products to move forward.
...
Gutierrez also insisted on pointing out that Microsoft's rather massive patent portfolio had been voted by some third party to be one of, if not the, best patent portfolios in terms of quality.
He suggested that other firms, such as IBM, were more likely to file very questionable patents, but Microsoft was much more focused on quality.
Perhaps that's a subjective measure, but given how many questionable Microsoft patents we see around here all the time, some may beg to differ -- or at least point out that some questionable patents are getting through.
In discussing all of this with Gutierrez, I brought up the company's continual FUD campaign, where it goes to the press to wave that pointy stick around, in announcing that Linux violates over 200 Microsoft patents.
859 online sources [ view sources ]
Profile is not claimed [ claim profile ]
