On Thu, 2 Sep 2004 12:31:54 -0700, Harold A'Hole
<madman(_at_)myeastside(_dot_)com> wrote:
Pirating a freely available, open source solution that was written by
another party and simply had some IP that MSFT may or may not even own would
be hard piracy to battle. There's no loss on MSFT's part. Heck, the
solution provider could have acquired the license themselves (I'm sure
sendmail and other OSS systems and all commercial email providers would have
no trouble sending in the free fax).
Do you have much experience with patent cases? I don't think you need
to show actual monetary damages either to recover statutory damages,
or to get an injunction against further infringing activities. Also,
as I've made clear in previous messages, sending in the "free fax" is
not so easy if you work for a university.
That said, since several people are so sure Microsoft would never
pursue this kind of case, I'm wondering if anyone out there would be
interested in indemnifying me against patent suits by Microsoft for
distributing a Sender-ID-compliant SMTP server? In exchange for
signing a legal agreement, I'll be glad to give you an unlimited,
non-exclusive, royalty free, and even sublicensable right to use, copy
and distribute a very cool SMTP server.
Before you indemnify me, though, you might want to take some history
into account. Remember that Microsoft didn't use to be a very
litigious company at all. Then one day they decided it was in their
strategic interest to enforce their patent rights on video codecs.
Who knows what's going to happen in the next 20 years? Is it really
so hard to imagine a scenario in which, say, a popular open-source
mail server uses a small but highly effective extension of Sender ID
to thwart spam, and Microsoft believes distribution of this software
is not in their strategic interest? (Remember, the license only
allows strict compliance with the standard.)