Patent Law Practice Center

Jury finds Corel willfully infringed Microsoft Office patents

A jury from the Northern District of California recently awarded Microsoft Corporation a total of $278,000 in a patent infringement action against Corel Corporation and Corel, Inc. (collectively “Corel”). See Microsoft Corporation v. Corel Corporation et al (Case: 5:15-cv-05836-EJD). Microsoft had requested more than $1 million in damages for the infringement of patents related to Microsoft Office (i.e., the Microsoft Office patents).

Microsoft sued Corel in December 2015, asserting infringement of nine patents — 5 utility patents and four design patents. By the time the case was submitted to the jury on Friday, February 9, 2018, only six patents remained in the case…two utility patents and four design patents.

Microsoft argued that Corel willfully infringed those patents. The asserted Microsoft patents are directed to graphic user interfaces used in Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Office. Microsoft asserted that it has given its interfaces, including menus and toolbars, a distinctive look and feel, which Corel copied into the accused products, including WordPerfect X7. WordPerfect X7 even includes an option to use the product in the “Microsoft Word mode.” See Complaint para 3-5. Similarly, Quatro Pro X7 offers the option to use the product in the “Microsoft Excel mode.” See Complaint para. 6-8.

In the jury verdict form returned, the jury unanimously agreed that Corel had willfully infringed those patents. (more…)

An interview with Microsoft’s Chief Patent Counsel

Micky Minhas (pictured left) is Chief Patent Counsel for Microsoft Corporation. He is also someone that I have known for more than 20 years. Like me, Minhas is a graduate of Franklin Pierce Law Center (now part of the University of New Hampshire). What follows are excerpts from my interview with Minhas, which took place on February 20, 2015. You can read the entire interview here.

Minhas on the current state of the law and why Microsoft has adopted the European technical standard as a safe harbor approach to drafting software patent applications:

MINHAS: I think we’re in a period of uncertainty where many participants in the field are wondering where that line on subject-matter eligibility is. I view this debate as a pendulum that had State Street on one end and now it is swinging or has already swung back to the other side with Alice. That depends on how you interpret and if you see any cohesion among all the cases that we’ve seen. So I think the patent practitioner community is in a somewhat uncertain place with respect to U.S. law. In terms of our patent cases – they have been written to satisfy various standards of patentability. A few years ago we ramped up our foreign filings and recognized that we’re writing this one document, this one patent application, for so many different audiences. We started settling in on the European technical standard as a guide for how to draft, how to cover the innovation from that vantage point, in order to try to write this document that would satisfy the USPTO as well as the EPO, Chinese Patent Office, the Japanese Patent Office, and so on. So for me, what this environment means as a practitioner has more to do with how the patent is drafted and how we capture the innovation, and not really a huge difference about what the underlying innovation is or how it’s implemented.

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A Survey of Some Interesting New Patents from Microsoft

According to statistics released earlier this year by the Intellectual Property Owners Association, Microsoft is near the top of the list when it comes to companies applying for and receiving U.S. patents. In 2013, the company was issued 2,814 patents, the 6th-most globally for that year and an increase for Microsoft by 4.1 percent over the previous year’s totals.

While Microsoft is primarily known for computer software, personal computers and other consumer electronics, they pursue a wide assortment of intriguing innovations, as evidenced by a recent review of issued U.S. patents to Microsoft.

As a major developer of computing products, it makes sense that Microsoft would have invested a lot of time and money into creating enhanced user interfaces for its computing products.  The natural user interface (NUI) developed by Microsoft for its Xbox Kinect system is further enhanced by U.S. Patent No. 8897491, which is titled System for Finger Recognition and Tracking (image shown left). This patent claims a method for generating a model of a user’s hands including one or more fingers which involves analyzing position and depth data of an image to recognize a user’s hand and techniques for discerning features of a hand. This system is capable of identifying commands made by fingers, which have typically been too small and subtle for conventional NUI systems to identify.

Speech recognition is an important field of development in user interfacing for computer resources and Microsoft has extended its holdings in this field through the issue of U.S. Patent No. 8892439, entitled Combination and Federation of Local and Remote Speech Recognition. This patent claims an article with a computer-readable storage device containing instructions that enable a computer to receive audio data indicating a task and performing speech recognition on the audio data utilizing local and remote recognizers. This system is intended to support the proliferation of applications utilizing automatic speech recognition (ASR) which can require access to large stores of data, slowing down mobile processes.

Intriguing mobile interfaces are also the focus of U.S. Patent No. 8902255, issued under the title Mobile Platform for Augmented Reality. This patent protects a system comprising a mobile image processing manager that obtains three-dimensional image data associated with an observation environment within a line of sight of an imaging device and a navigational plan engine for determining a navigational plan for a mobile platform. This system would enable the superimposing of digital features onto an image captured by a mobile device or may otherwise project virtual images onto a surrounding environment.

A couple of patents which caught our eye during our recent survey of Microsoft would aid a variety of meetings which use Microsoft computing products as meeting platforms. Techniques for identifying the participants of a meeting who are located inside of a physical meeting room are outlined by U.S. Patent No. 8892123, which is titled Identifying Meeting Attendees Using Information from Devices. The computer-implemented method involves automatically recognizing the physical presence of a mobile device in proximity to a physical meeting place and including a profile associated with that mobile device as an attendant at the meeting. This innovation is designed to remove the manual nature of confirming a roster of meeting attendees at a physical meeting place. Meetings taking place through online platforms are the target of the technology protected by U.S. Patent No. 8890926, titled Automatic Identification and Representation of Most Relevant People in Meetings (image shown below). The method involves presenting participants of a meeting in order of their relevancy which involves categorizing the participants based on a set of factors and presenting participants in a user interface gallery which emphasizes relevancy categories by utilizing a spatial grouping scheme. This system is configured to present meeting participants to other meeting participants in a way that provides a better meeting context than systems that focus on presenting the loudest talker.

We’ll close our discussion of patents recently issued to Microsoft with a look at a technology that will help those with strict dietary restrictions find the perfect meal while eating out at a restaurant. U.S. Patent No. 8903708, which is titled Analyzing Restaurant Menus in View of Consumer Preferences, claims a method of analyzing food items available at a restaurant that involves storing a list of food criteria on a mobile device, receiving menu data about available food items at the device and displaying menu data on the mobile device which has been filtered based on a user’s dietary needs. This invention should be of interest to those with medical conditions, like high blood pressure or diabetes, as well as other preferences, such as price or calories.

Microsoft Acquires Cloud-Based Customer Service Company, Parature

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) recently announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Parature, a provider of cloud-based customer-engagement solutions. Parature’s social customer service tools, including live chat, are becoming increasingly important due to the shift from laptop and desktop computers to mobile devices, especially tablets. Zach’s Investment Research says that it anticipates that this acquisition will help Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM software to compete more effectively against the likes of Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM). The terms of the agreement are not being disclosed.

Parature’s approach to its solutions enables organizations to take advantage of an extendable knowledge base available through self-service portals on the Web and Facebook, support ticketing, mobile customer care on virtually any device the customer chooses to use, social customer support, and chat for both traditional customer service scenarios and proactive sales engagement to create new, revenue-generating opportunities for the business. These capabilities complement the existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM customer-care solution with core strengths in workflow, extensibility and process-driven user experiences that allow contact center agents to do their best work.

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Recent Patents and the Story of Microsoft’s Xbox One

There have been reports that the Sony Playstation outsold the Microsoft Xbox One by a 2 to 1 margin, but TIME reports that these numbers really aren’t particularly honest or informative. The reports that the Playstation is outselling the Xbox One by a 2 to 1 margin come from a study, or at least observations, of sales leading up to Christmas on eBay. But online auction sales from a single retailer are hardly appropriate to gauge what really happened in the broader marketplace.

All that is known for now is that both the Sony Playstation and the Xbox One were in extremely high demand and sold out this holiday season. Both of these game consoles will be around for a while, and both have a long  history and patent portfolio behind them. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the Xbox and some of the recent patents behind the device.

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