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Difference between revisions of "Examples of use for sabotage"

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Revision as of 08:07, 17 August 2009

Software patents are often used as weapons to harm competitors.

Adobe example

"Bruce Chizen, Adobe's boss, sued Macromedia. There was no particular reason for the lawsuit, he recalls, but he had been irked for some time that Macromedia...had appeared to be embarassing the much bigger Adobe...Mr Chizen's people found an obscure patent that Macromedia was probably infringing upon and took it to court. The idea was 'to slow them down a bit' smirks Mr. Chizen."
--The Economist, December 10th-16th 2005, p71 "Sue, kiss, marry"

IBM example

"Confidently, we [Sun Microsystems] proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.
"An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?
"After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list."
--Forbes, June 24th 2002, "Patently Absurd"[1]

UK Lord Justice Jacob's comments

In the 2006 ruling on Aerotel v. Telco in the UK, Lord Justice Jacob commented that "If your competitors are getting or trying to get the weapons of business method or computer program patents you must too. An arms race in which the weapons are patents has set in."

External links