
Drunk On Licensing Fees And Patents, Microsoft Has Become A Joke - bound008
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/this-title-is-patented-pay-me/
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famousactress
_"How long until Microsoft is making more money on patent licensing than from
their mobile unit? Serious question. Maybe they already are."_

I'd imagine there's an _excellent_ chance that they already are. Sounds much
cheaper to keep a stable of lawyers around than hundreds of engineers,
testers, support staff, and marketing folk.

If you think the margins on selling software are high...

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api
The latest trend in business: make money by creating no value whatsoever!

Actually, in my experience this is the MBA ideal. From the pure bean-counting
perspective, the ideal business would be something that just made free money.
No staff, no overhead, etc.

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tzs
Is it an industry requirement that in order to write about patents you have to
not know anything about them? In particular, the author seems to not
understand that a plaintiff claiming that their patent is being used by
defendant to accomplish X does not mean plaintiff is claiming that their
patent covers all possible ways to do X.

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lallysingh
It's not all that different from when MS used to license OSs to vendors by the
number of machines sold, _total_ \--- not the number that had windows on them.

Parasites.

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mrkurt
Like ESPN licenses it's channels (and even ESPN3) based on the number of
subscribers, not the people who actually tune into them?

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rosser
If you're subscribed to a package that includes ESPN*, then ESPN gets its
share of that subscription revenue. If you're not, they don't. The analog for
MSFT's licensing practices would have ESPN getting a cut for every subscriber,
whether or not their package included ESPN.

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mrkurt
ESPN gets a cut for every Comcast internet subscriber, that's why I get to
enjoy ESPN3 (their streaming service). They also tend to do things like
mandate that ESPN be available in the lowest level cable packages. Have you
ever had to pay extra to get ESPN? If you buy more than the local channels,
ESPN comes along.

It's obviously not exactly analogous, but volume licensing based on the number
of consumers/seats/etc is pretty standard. We grant people a monopoly over
their IP and it turns out they want to extract as much value as they can from
it.

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Laments
Before we derail too hard on this article, I would like to take a moment to
point out that there's an article ranked higher about how Apple's suing Amazon
over the term "App Store"... not like they've sued Microsoft over the term,
too. (Also on HN somewhere.)

So, it's not just MS who sues -- but lest we forget, TC needs to be
provocative and incite us to be persnickity. That's some high-quality
bloggin'.

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acabal
Siegler is surprised that MS is doing something greedy and underhanded? Is he
even aware of MS's history from not even 10 years ago?

