01.03.08
Acacia, Microsoft and Wishful Thinking
The ‘lawsuit firm’ Acacia, a patent troll with Microsoft links [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], has had a busy month, according to patent TrollTracker.
Turning to our busiest patent troll in 2007, Acacia, it kept up momentum in December with new lawsuits.
[…]
So, let’s get this straight. Acacia, a California company located in CDCA, is an exclusive licensee who has sued 19 defendants, who are located in 17 different judicial districts (including CDCA)
The broken state of the USPTO has given birth to an industry of trolls whose only contribution to society is harassment and pain. In the same fashion, a weak political system has raised a multi-billion dollar industry of lobbying, which is, to an extent, a legalised form of bribery. Even the country’s administration has recently come to realise this. It plans to cut down the level of this plague accordingly.
In other patent news, Microsoft wants to patent ‘Big Brother’, adding that to its portfolio of brow-raising patents.
Judging from a recent patent application, Microsoft hopes to build some sort of “activity monitoring system” that keeps an eye on worker productivity using various “physiological or environmental sensors.” These sensors would track everything from heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, facial expressions, and blood pressure to brain signals and galvanic skin response.
On a separate (and yet related) note, Bruce Byfield reused some of his arguments against this Web site and made it a blog post. The post characterises our interpretation of motives as a “conspiracy theory”. This was discussed so many times before, so it hardly needs repeating. He seems to believe that Microsoft plays no role at all. Never mind if there is undeniable truth, such as the fact that Microsoft offered people money to sue Linux (the kernel).
”Novell does not do anything which it does with malicious intents.“By the way, the blog post also confirms all suspicions that he consistently tried to deny — suspicions that he was all along biased in favour GNOME’s stance on OOXML. He did this even in his journalistic writings that are intended not to contain bias and present both side of the arguments.
Just as Bruce Byfield says that he’ll ignore what he considers a theory (apparently, OpenOffice.org finds our site worthy enough to put it in its front page), maybe we should take Groklaw’s advice and learn to ignore those who live in a world where companies never do anything wrong. Convenient fantasies like that are too cuddly not to embrace.
Novell does not do anything which it does with malicious intents. Nevertheless, we must understand why it does the things which it has done in the past year. It’s about understanding, not demonisation or witch hunting. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.