| Bill Gates pays again for patent infringement Another high-profile trial ended in the defeat of the computer giant Microsoft. On Monday, a Chicago jury ordered the corporation to pay a huge fine to the University of California and Eolas Technologies for illegal use of patented technologies. According to the court decision, the fine amounted to $520.6 million - not a lot of money, considering the corporate scale of the computer program manufacturer. But if you take into account the total number of private claims that the company is forced to pay every year, the resulting sums are impressive. Moreover, this trial has become the most onerous in cost among private lawsuits this year.
The essence of the matter is as follows. Former University of California professor Michael Doyle, who founded Eolas Technologies and is chairman of its board of directors, said that Microsoft illegally used its developments in its Internet Explorer web browser. In 1994, Doyle and two other researchers at the University of San Francisco applied for a patent, which is now held by the University of California. And just a year later, Microsoft developed Internet Explorer, which supposedly borrowed some of the technologies from Eolas Technologies. Mainly those that help simplify the process of downloading music, videos and other resources over the Internet. According to Doyle, in this way the Bill Gates corporation managed to quickly exclude Netscape Communications with their core development of Netscape Navigator from the list of its main competitors (currently, the former leader in the field of Internet technologies Netscape Communications controls less than 10% of the core market).
The initial amount of the claim was $1.2 billion, but even after a two-fold reduction in compensation, the court's decision was accompanied by loud applause from the administration of the University of California. “As a public organization that reinvests its license revenues into larger research projects, we are very pleased with the court's decision that the university and Eolas should receive sufficient compensation for the use of their patent technology,” James Holst, one of the university's lawyers, commented on the event. .
Microsoft does not intend to agree with the court's verdict. At the end of the hearing, representatives of the corporation immediately announced their intention to file an appeal. “We intend to appeal today's decision and are confident that the law will be on our side,” the company said in an official statement. Corporation spokesman Jim Desler emphasized that the browser was created based on technologies produced exclusively by Microsoft specialists, without violating any patent regulations. Denis UVAROV |
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