Intellectual Property: Microsoft tries to squash Android

Microsoft says ""Other vendors, including HTC, a market leader in Android smartphones, have taken a license under this program, and we have tried for over a year to reach licensing agreements with Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec. Their refusals to take licenses leave us no choice but to bring legal action to defend our innovations and fulfil our responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year to bring great software products and services to market."

But, HTC is also a customer of Microsoft: it was one of the early adopters of MS Windows 7 Mobile (or whatever it's called - we honestly don't care).

The Redmond giant - which seems to spend as much time in the patents courts as it does actually producing product - says "The patents at issue cover a range of functionality embodied in Android devices that are essential to the user experience, including: natural ways of interacting with devices by tabbing through various screens to find the information they need; surfing the Web more quickly, and interacting with documents and e-books."

So, what it is actually trying to do is to grab a licensing deal off Barnes and Noble for the Nook e-reader and to protect the future revenues that it expects to grow now it has become the sole operating system supplier for Nokia.

US Patent Law deals with the concepts e.g. patenting collecting water from a stream in a container and delivering it to a village; in other countries, the concept would not be patented, but the mechanism by which it is achieved would be e.g. a pipe with a tap on the end.

In the instant case, Microsoft argues that it came up with the concept of sliding pages across a screen. Aside from being at best a dubious idea (did no one ever write a program in Basic that replaced one screen of text with another, even sliding it up, down or across on demand?) in a sensible world, the coding that makes that happen would be protected. The fact that it can be done would not.

And that is how it should be.

US Patent law is a fetter on the clog of invention. The US Government constantly tries to force other countries to follow its ludicrous system. And that raises the barriers to entry into the software market ensuring the US maintains the lead it has built up.

Time for a real rebellion. The USA needs to reverse this stupid form of protection, other countries need to refuse to implement it and to ban US originated product from their markets until it is reversed.

After all, that's what the USA does if it doesn't like the way another country runs its laws.