WOW!! Microsoft ordered to pay $521 million!

[Technoid]

This is what I call a hefty fine

[thop]

Hefty fine? Bill Gates can pay 100 times that fine.

[Technoid]

Seen from my side of the fence its hefty

[High_Jumbllama]

I am all for Microsoft getting put in it's place but this ridiculous. They should then sue what's left of Netscape and the Mozilla foundation.

[Marshmallowman]

The are after the proceeds eg. it was 1%of the value of all windows sold.

mozilla...they don't sell nothing, so they can have 100% of the proceeds , and netscapt don't exist anymore.

But it does sound a bit on the dodgy, I wonder when they first started proceedings against MS, was it in 95 or a lot more recent?

[High_Jumbllama]

Geesh! Why don't they sue Photoshop and Ulead or DBPoweramp or Winamp or any Unreal or Quake Engine based games in addition to the thousands upon thousands of other programs that use some sort of add-on module capability.

[Marshmallowman]

At the time it may have been quite novel and new, but now it seems like old hat..

And its not simply plugins, but that is a very obvious use...(obvious now)

It very hard thinking back to that period, it may be legitimate, but they have may have waited to long...

I think this may be a bit like hyperlinks.

Somone did invent hyperlinks, now we take them as obvious and unpatentable because of their wide spread use, but when they were first used it was a free novelty that was neat and no one thought it worth patenting....(until 10 years later when BT gets greedy)

It may be legitimate, but for me they have left it to late, but you never know rambus and SCO base their companies futures on just such situations. World wide IP laws suck big time, I think this is nothing compared to the fact some f#ck is/has patented some of my genetic info ....WTF

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by Marshmallowman
The are after the proceeds eg. it was 1%of the value of all windows sold.

mozilla...they don't sell nothing, so they can have 100% of the proceeds , and netscapt don't exist anymore.

I can assure you Netscape do exist and is quite a profitable company, by all accounts. As for the Netscape browser/e-mail client, it can knock MSIE/Outlook into a cocked hat in its latest version, without propagating worms, Trojan Horses and other viruses. Wouldn't be without it!

And 1% got them off lightly: the maximum penalty was 10%. The BBC said that this is peanuts for MS, as they have a reserve of $5b set aside for such penalties.