Seen at The Register. InterTrust Technologies Corp has gone gunning for Microsoft Corp with a second patent infringement lawsuit. The Santa Clara-based firm is seeking an injunction and damages from Redmond, saying Windows XP violates a seven-year old patented technology it owns, writes Kevin Murphy.
This time the company claims that XP's method of digitally signing and authenticating more than 12,000 software drivers violates InterTrust's patent 6,157,721, which covers a "trusted operating system" technology developed in 1995. InterTrust also claims that it attempted to license the technology to Microsoft in 1999, but was turned away.
"We see a pattern from this company," said a Microsoft spokesperson. "They take advantage of whatever latest product [Microsoft comes out with], now it's this spurious at best linkage to Trustworthy Computing... I'm losing count of how many legal filings they've made."
While the latest suit is only the second, the first suit has been revised on a number of occasions to include new products as Microsoft announced details of them. The first suit relates to digital rights management technologies incorporated in Windows XP via Windows Media Player, which is embedded in the OS.
"If they came up with something new, we wouldn't be suing them," said Ed Fish, president of InterTrust's MetaTrust Utility Division. "We invented this technology more than three years before Microsoft."
News source: The Register
