[Fsf-friends] [OT] DRM battles

[Raju Mathur]

[Beware: cross-posted]

The DRM players are battling it out, and MS seems to be in a
vulnerable position:

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0%2c15935%2c400412%2c00.html

INTERTRUST
Can Victor Shear Bring Down Microsoft?

Maybe not. But his company's patent suit is the biggest legal threat
to Microsoft since the antitrust case.

FORTUNE Tuesday, December 17, 2002 By Roger Parloff

A small Santa Clara, Calif., company called InterTrust Technologies
maintains that it is, in fact, that company. Though there are those
who dispute this claim, InterTrust has some awfully big players
convinced, including consumer electronics giants Sony and
Philips. Indeed, in November, the two companies offered to buy
InterTrust for $453 million in cash; as FORTUNE goes to press, they
are in the process of trying to close the acquisition.

In its current incarnation, InterTrust consists of 39 employees and a
patent portfolio: 26 issued patents and about 85 more pending, all in
the fields of DRM and trusted systems. InterTrust also has one other
asset of note: a suit against Microsoft that appears to be the
highest-stakes patent litigation in history. The suit's charges give a
good feel for the scope and breadth of InterTrust's patents, at least
as InterTrust sees it. The company says its patents are being
infringed every time Microsoft ships its Windows XP operating system;
Office XP suite; Word 2002 word processor; Excel 2002 spreadsheet;
Outlook 2002 e-mail client; PowerPoint 2002 slide presentation
software; Windows Media Player; Xbox videogame console; Microsoft
software for servers, mobile phones, pocket computers, and consumer
electronics devices; and many of the components and tool kits that
Microsoft now markets in connection with its most cutting-edge "bet
the company" initiative: the networked computing and web-services
platform known as .NET. Understand what that means: InterTrust is
seeking an injunction barring distribution of about 85% of Microsoft's
product line. (Though the DRM and trusted systems technologies form
only a piece of each product, they have been, in Microsoft's trademark
fashion, tightly integrated into these larger programs.) InterTrust
seeks damages too--which could be trebled if Microsoft were shown to
have acted willfully. Polaroid's spectacular 1976 patent suit against
Kodak--which eventually forced Kodak to scrap its $2 billion foray
into instant photography and pay $900 million in damages--is dwarfed
by the scope of the InterTrust-Microsoft litigation.

[snip]

-- 
Raju Mathur               raju@kandalaya.org      http://kandalaya.org/
                      It is the mind that moves