| Bill Gates will have to fork out again Bill Gates continues to pay for his sins. Yesterday, Microsoft announced it had settled a three-year lawsuit with InterTrust Technologies over infringement of InterTrust's digital rights management (DRM) patents. The settlement cost Microsoft $440 million.
The dispute erupted over developments related to the group of DRM technologies. These technologies produced a revolution in their time, laying the foundation for online trading of intellectual property. The fact is that simply selling a file over the Internet, for example, with a musical composition, is not very effective, since the user who bought it can freely distribute the composition on the Internet. With the help of DRM, information about who acquired the rights to it is recorded in the file. Accordingly, copying the file becomes pointless, since the copies will be inoperative. Now DRM is used by all Western companies involved in distributing music, movies and books on the Internet.
It is interesting that at first Microsoft actively collaborated with InterTrust and invested $100 million in it from 1998 to 2000. However, then Bill Gates' corporation switched to using its own DRM developments, which, according to InterTrust, replicate the technologies it patented. Therefore, in 2001, InterTrust sued Microsoft. Moreover, if at first the claims concerned the multimedia player Windows Media Player and the e-book viewer program from Microsoft, InterTrust subsequently stated that the technologies stolen from it were already used in Windows XP and Microsoft Office XP.
Since DRM will be used more and more in the future, it was very important for Microsoft to resolve the legal issues associated with the use of these technologies. "The agreement is part of Microsoft's efforts to make clear to our users and partners that we are responsible for licensing patents," said Microsoft Vice President Marshall Phelps. “Our strong work in managing intellectual property provides confidence that Microsoft has the rights to pursue innovative solutions.”
Over the past year, Bill Gates' empire has had to spend a lot of money to resolve claims from various sides. Thus, a week ago, Microsoft agreed to pay its longtime competitor SUN Microsystems $1.95 billion for violating its patents and exploiting its monopoly position. A little earlier, the European Commission imposed a fine of 500 million euros on Microsoft for unfair methods of competition. And last year, Microsoft paid $750 million to America Online as part of a settlement. Next up is a settlement of a lawsuit by the American telecommunications giant AT&T regarding the infringement of its patents on technologies for transmitting voice over the Internet. As a result, the price that Microsoft paid for its leadership over the past year alone is approaching $4 billion. Igor KOROLEV |
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