Microsoft and Salesforce.com settle patent lawsuit

Microsoft and Salesforce.com have settled the patent infringement cases they each brought before the US District Court. "We are pleased to reach this agreement with Salesforce.com to put an end to the litigation between our two companies," said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft.

The cases have been settled through a patent agreement in which Salesforce.com will receive broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio for its products and services as well as its back-end server infrastructure during the term; Microsoft, in turn, will receive coverage under Salesforce.com's patent portfolio for its products and services. The details of the agreement have not been disclosed, but the parties did indicate that Microsoft is being compensated by Salesforce.com based on the strength of Microsoft's leading patent portfolio in the areas of operating systems, cloud services, and customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Incidentally, Microsoft took the time to underline that Microsoft Dynamics CRM garnered recognition as a leader from two leading independent research firms: Gartner and Forrester Research. Is it a coincidence that Microsoft chose today to issue a press release (linked below) on the topic?

Two months ago, Microsoft filed a federal lawsuit against Salesforce.com, claiming that the online CRM software company infringes on nine patents awarded to Microsoft between 1997 and 2007. Redmond claimed that it first notified Salesforce.com of its infringement over a year ago, and Salesforce.com's January SEC filing warned that Microsoft had been approached by a "large technology company" with allegations that it was infringing on patents. The original complaint asked for temporary and permanent injunctions, monetary damages, and asserted that the infringement is willful.

Microsoft often finds itself on the receiving end of patent lawsuits, but when the company believes that others are infringing it traditionally seeks to reach a licensing agreement with the other party rather than get the courts involved. Microsoft says it has reached more than 600 licensing agreements since launching its intellectual-property licensing program in December 2003.

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Microsoft sues spammers for abusing Hotmail anti-spam filters

Two anti-spam systems developed by Microsoft for Hotmail designed to help ISPs track down offending users were abused by spammers, a lawsuit brought last week by the software giant alleges. The spammers are accused of attacking Hotmail's Junk Mail Reporting Program and Smart Network Data Services to try to prevent the mail service from classifying messages correctly.

The suit, Microsoft Corporation v. Boris Mizhen, et al., claims that the defendants created millions of Hotmail accounts and used them to falsely label up to 200,000 spam messages a day as legitimate mail. With this evidence of "legitimacy," an associate of Mizhen then contacted Microsoft asking that the company stop treating them as spam. Microsoft asserts that this deception allowed Mizhen and his affiliates to disseminate a "vast quantity" of spam to Hotmail users, and that this violates various federal laws including the CAN-SPAM act.

This is not the first time that Boris Mizhen has been sued by Microsoft. He was sued in 2003 for spamming Hotmail users; the case was settled, with Mizhen agreeing to pay the company $2 million and refrain from further spamming Hotmail users.

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HTC avoids two-front patent war with Microsoft pact

Microsoft has announced that it has signed a patent agreement with mobile phone manufacturer HTC for the sale of Android-equipped devices. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal or even the patents that Microsoft agreed to license; Microsoft merely said that it would receive royalties from HTC and that it would expand HTC's "long-standing business relationship" with the company.

"We have a responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to ensure that competitors do not free ride on our innovations," Microsoft IP deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said in a statement. "We have also consistently taken a proactive approach to licensing to resolve IP infringement by other companies, and have been talking with several device manufacturers to address our concerns relative to the Android mobile platform."

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Windows XP downgrade lawsuit dismissed

US District Court Judge Marsha Pechman has dismissed a year-old lawsuit against Microsoft over alleged antitrust violations for the downgrade rules it set for Windows Vista and XP. Pechman said the plaintiff had not proved Microsoft benefited from the downgrade practices that it created and that OEMs implemented. Since the plaintiff did not pay to downgrade to XP after buying a Vista PC, there was no evidence shown that Microsoft retained a benefit without giving value, he ruled. "We're pleased the Court agreed that Plaintiff's complaint failed to state a viable claim and dismissed it in its entirety," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars.

The decision puts an end to the lawsuit filed in February 2009 by Emma Alvarado, a Los Angeles resident who accused Microsoft of pushing OEMs to force consumers who wanted to run Windows XP to first buy Windows Vista (or later, Windows 7) before they were allowed to downgrade their operating systems. Alvarado claimed that she had paid a $59.25 fee in mid-2008 to downgrade her new Lenovo laptop from Vista to XP, but Microsoft denied it had profited since it does not charge or receive any additional royalty if a customer exercises its downgrade rights. Instead, it is the computer makers that charge users the additional fees for downgrading (Alvarado did not name Lenovo in her lawsuit).

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