Eye on Winer

Notwithstanding all of Dave’s bloviating about patents and his emotional understanding of them as some tool of evil, this is sort of laughable:

I think now would be a great time to hear from Ray Ozzie. He is an officer of the company. His word, if given in writing, would be binding on the company. Microsoft isn’t taking this seriously, by sending their response back through Sean, if that’s how we’re meant to understand this.

No. No it wouldn’t. It would be no more binding than Dave saying he’s going to quit blogging. Ray Ozzie could fire up a blog and say Microsoft is going to give everyone in the country ten bucks. And when you went to sue Microsoft to recover your Hamilton you would be told what every law student learns early in their first contracts class: Ozzie’s words, written or not, did not constitute an enforceable contract.

It could be argued, weakly, that a statement by Ozzie would constitute a license to use Microsoft’s patented property, but (given the lack of consideration on the other side) it could be revoked at any time for any reason, or no reason. It would make Dave feel better, but it certainly could not be brought into court to protect someone from a patent infringement suit.

Arguments that the community’s contributions to Microsoft’s patented IP constitute consideration would fail for lack of privity, past consideration, and the fact that the contributions were put into the public domain.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 24th, 2006 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Microsoft, RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.