Patent pending
A whole bunch of tech's biggest hitters have rallied behind Microsoft and filed briefs with the US' Supreme Court to push for change to the central standard used to decide whether patent infringements are won or lost.
According to the Seattlepi blog, Microsoft has called on the court to think again about how the law decides on whether patents are sound or not, as part of a last-ditch attempt to stop a $290m payout to i4i.
In a bid to back up the software giant, Google, Apple, Intel, Yahoo, Dell, Facebook, HP and others are believed to have filed ‘friend of the court' briefs for a change as they too fear the current system is not defendant-friendly enough.
At the moment, courts reportedly apply the ‘clear and convincing evidence' standard in infringement lawsuits to work out whether a US patent is valid or not. Microsoft and other tech companies want to have the standard changed to ‘preponderance of evidence' as they frequently deal in intellectual property.
In some ways, analysts have argued that such a change would effectively be a down-grading of the current standard from ‘certainly' to ‘very probably'. This would make it easier for tech firms to argue that a patent is not valid and win patent infringement cases brought against them.
As well as saving some pennies on damages, companies could also potentially dodge pricey legal fees, but on the other hand such a change would also afford less protection to holders of legit US patents.
