Microsoft: "Our software patents preclude interoperability"
Throughout the last two days in European Court, Microsoft tried to explain to the European Court and Commission its "Blue Bubble Theorem" about Active Directory Services (ADS) being surrounded by a Blue Bubble within which interoperability was impossible.
Carlo Piana, Free Software Foundation Europe's lawyer on the case explains: "The interventions made perfectly clear that the Blue Bubble only existed in the lawyers' pleadings. Meanwhile, Microsoft left no doubt as to the legal nature of that Bubble: a conglomerate of 46 patents that it claims it holds on ADS, whose main effect is to prevent interoperability and, eventually, competition."
So Microsoft maintains that without licenses to these software patents, which they would strongly object to and essentially referred to as "expropriation", forcing the interoperability information to be released might turn out to be irrelevant: Future competitors might find themselves involved in costly software patent litigation rather quickly.
"This proves effectively how software patents are fundamentally opposed to competiton, and thus harm economy and society. In the European fight about software patents, the proponents tried to make the claim software patents were about innovation. Today Microsoft once more demonstrated how they are indeed helping build and maintain illegal monopolies", Georg Greve, president of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) said today and continued: "It reminded me of a 1991 quote of Bill Gates that summarises software patents rather effectively [1]:
'If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today. The solution ... is patent exchanges ... and patenting as much as we can... A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.'"
FSFE referred to that quote in a feature article [2] earlier this week. Greve concludes: "Software patents are limited mini-monopolies on ideas that should allow to share ideas for the inspiration and benefit for society. In software they have the opposite effect and build mega-monopolies."
[1] http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001447.shtml [2] http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/ms-vs-eu/article-20060421.it.html
About the Free Software Foundation Europe:
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is a charitable non-governmental organisation dedicated to all aspects of Free Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may participate in a digital society. Therefore the freedoms to use, copy, modify and redistribute software - as described in the Free Software definition - allow equal participation in the information age. Creating awareness of these issues, securing Free Software politically and legally, and giving people freedom by supporting development of Free Software are central issues of the FSF Europe, which was founded in 2001 as the European sister organisation of the Free Software Foundation in the United States.