By Contador Harrison Wanarua
I am a mobile application developer working through projects for MOCE Ltd UK and somocon Oy finland and acuezza Robertson Australia with wealthy of years mobile experience.i provide advice, feasibility studies and design/implement applications that add functionality to mobile devices in different platforms.
Contador wanarua has written 3 articles for PromotionWorld.The US Supreme Court said Microsoft must pay following rulings by lower courts that it had infringed a patent on a technology linked to the Microsoft Word, a widely used word-processing program. A Toronto-based company called i4i first sued Microsoft four years ago, arguing that it owned the technology behind a tool on the popular software.
A Texan court originally set the compensation and ordered Microsoft to stop selling the 2003 and 2007 versions of Word containing the infringing technology.
Microsoft appealed and argued that the original judge had used the wrong standard in instructing the jury that came up with the award. The software giant said a jury should make a decision based on a "preponderance" of evidence instead of the "clear and convincing" evidence standard instructed by the judge. However, the Supreme Court said the "clear and convincing" standard was the correct one. Microsoft now only sells versions of the word-processing software that do not contain the technology.
While the outcome is not what we had hoped for, we will continue to advocate for changes to the law that will prevent abuse of the patent system and protect inventors who hold patents representing true innovation according to Microsoft sources. Loudon Owen, chairman of i4i, said: "Microsoft tried to gut the value of patents by introducing a lower standard for invalidating patents. It is now 100pc clear that you can only invalidate a patent based on 'clear and convincing' evidence.
Bill Gates said once in 1983, "imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name ... without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art. What few people saw was that this practice of stealing intellectual property was exactly what Bill Gates had in store for Microsoft. Why would a company spend tremendous effort developing a product only to have another firm come along and steal the idea, claiming the work as its own?
The use of this activity would stunt innovation in the industry, because no person could afford to develop products if he/she is not to reap the rewards from the market. The truth is, this has been Microsoft's business strategy from the beginning. Bill Gates and his supporters would have you believe that he wrote MS-DOS himself. As we've seen, this is not true. It originally started life as CP/M at Digital Research, was cloned by the Seattle Computer Company as QDOS, and then sold to Microsoft.
This claim mirrors Microsoft's claims for all of its products. The idea behind the interface of the Mac OS was stolen from Apple and renamed Windows. Excel was not a product of Microsoft's own creative thinking, but was a take-off on VisiCalc, the killer application in the late-80's. Internet Explorer is a copy of Netscape Navigator. The Network PC tries to mimic the functions of the Network Computer. The Palm PC is a clone of the PalmPilot. In fact, if you look closely enough, you can take virtually any Microsoft product and find the true originator of it lying outside of Microsoft's corporate walls.
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