Tag: Patents

Lately we’ve seen many complaints about the proliferation of patent holding companies, which buy patents, usually from small inventors, and then try to extract royalties, by negotiation or lawsuit, from companies that (allegedly) use the patented inventions. Often this is depicted as some kind of outrage. But from a policy standpoint I don’t see a…

A two-year-old internal memo from Hewlett-Packard predicted that Microsoft would soon launch patent-infringement suits against companies that distribute open-source products such as Linux and Apache, according to a Joe Barr story at NewsForge. (The article reprints the memo in full.) The memo is clearly based on statements made by Microsoft negotiators during a patent licensing…