Last year we noted that while it was amusing to see a lawsuit from someone angry that they had to pay to downgrade from Vista to XP on their computer, it was hard to see how it was an antitrust violation, as the lawsuit was alleging. As we joked, perhaps that could be Microsoft's new business model: keep coming out with worse and worse operating systems, but charge people more and more to stick with the older systems. Either way, as we expected, that lawsuit didn't last long and was recently thrown out. As the court found, there was no evidence that Microsoft actually benefited from users downgrading. It seems pretty clear that Microsoft has always wanted people to sign up for its latest operating systems, and it would greatly prefer that over anyone (paying or not) downgrading to older versions. It also turned out that the "fee" the woman who brought the lawsuit paid was not to Microsoft, but to the computer manufacturer (in that case, Lenovo). In fact, the court pointed out that, technically, Microsoft gave a "free" extra operating system with the deal, since the buyer received both Vista and XP, at no additional revenue to Microsoft.

Last summer, of course, there was a lot of attention paid to China's announced plans that every PC sold in China needed to include the new "Green Dam Youth Escort" software, which was a client-side filtering program. After international outrage over the plan actually had some sort of impact, the government backed down. A smaller story, that came out during all of this, was that the Green Dam software appeared to copy significant portions of the commercial filter product, CyberSitter. Now, CyberSitter has sued the Chinese government and a bunch of companies for $2.2 billion. The lawsuit has been filed in Los Angeles, and I would wonder what jurisdiction a Los Angeles district court has over the Chinese government concerning software that was only to be used in China.

While the lawsuit does include the expected copyright claim, it also goes much further to claim trade secret violations and "conspiracy." And while the Chinese government is obviously the headline grabber, it also includes Sony, Lenovo, Toshiba, Acer, ASUSTek, BenQ and Haier, claiming that these computer makers were in on the conspiracy. While many of those have US operations, it seems like a longshot that (a) the court has jurisdiction over their actions in China or (b) the charge of "conspiracy" has any chance of sticking.

Three and a half years ago, I wrote an article about the coming WiFi patent problem, focusing on the Canadian company Wi-LAN who claimed a bunch of patents related to WiFi technology. The company started off by suing Cisco. That lawsuit was eventually settled, but Wi-LAN clearly wasn't done yet. The company has now sued 22 different companies for violating its patents. This strategy seems to be the new strategy of patent holders: sue a ton of high profile companies all at once. It's what Sandisk did for example. Why is it becoming more popular? Because these patent holders are afraid that one of the potential targets might sue them first, seeking a declaratory judgment saying they don't infringe, and do so in a court other than the patent friendly court in Marshall, Texas. Oh yeah, Wi-LAN also notes that it's more economical to sue everyone at once. How nice of them.

Of course, Wi-LAN is hardly the only company that claims patents having to do with WiFi. It's a true patent thicket. If all these patents were actually valid and needed to be licensed no one could afford WiFi and it would be worthless. It's also worth noting that Wi-LAN's target list is somewhat ridiculous as well. It appears to be suing up and down the supply chain from chip suppliers like Broadcom and Intel to computer makers like Apple, Dell, Lenovo and Sony all the way to retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City. Assuming that all are somehow responsible for paying Wi-LAN the company could conceivably get license fees three or four times for the same computer. It's not hard to start adding up the questionable things going on here: (1) broad patents that are claimed to be important for a standard long after that standard has become widespread (2) these patents are one of many, many patents that claim to cover WiFi technology (3) filing the lawsuit against many companies at once (4) filing the lawsuit in east Texas and (5) filing the patents up and down the supply chain. This isn't what the patent system was designed to do and patent attorneys know it.

A bunch of folks have been submitting the latest story on a patent hoarding firm, Premier International Associates, who appears to have absolutely no other business than getting its hands on questionable, overly broad, obvious patents and then suing everyone possible. In this case, the patent is for the basic concept of a playlist, which can be found just about anywhere. So, it should come as little to no surprise that the list of companies sued is quite long, including: Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Viacom, Real, Napster, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Sandisk, HP, Acer, Gateway and Yahoo (phew!). That's quite a list, though it's not surprising to see that there are a ton of companies offering software that has a concept so basic and so obvious as a playlist.

However, there is one very interesting point here. Apple is missing from the list. As the folks over at Ars Technica figured out, Premier actually had sued Apple about this same patent back in 2005, but at the same time it was filing all these new patent lawsuits it filed to dismiss the Apple suit, suggesting that Apple most likely paid off the company (perhaps giving it the money needed to suddenly sue every other company in the universe. Apple certainly has a history of doing this. When the company was sued on a rather similar obvious patent on a hierarchical menu-based user interfaces held by Creative, it eventually (after spending some time fighting it) decided to simply pay $100 million to be left alone. Of course, all that did was allow Creative to head out and sue plenty of others. Sound familiar? By settling on these questionable patent claims, all Apple is doing is encouraging more lawsuits of this nature for itself, as well as others.

When companies move part of their operations to India, it's usually for something like back office support or software development. Creative work is typically not the first thing that companies would think to move there. But Chinese computer maker Lenovo has announced that India will be the home of its advertising operations, and that the unit will be tasked with designing advertising campaigns for a global audience. It may be too early to call it a trend, but this should be worrisome to the advertising industry's New York-based stalwarts. One advantage that Indian advertisers have is that they're used to building campaigns that play well in multiple languages, simply due to the various languages within India itself. For them, advertising to a global audience is a natural next step. And, of course, there are cost advantages. It's sill much cheaper to hire advertising professionals in India than it is in New York. While incumbent advertising agencies are likely to stick around for some time, it wouldn't be a surprise to see them move more of their own operations to the country, a la other services firms, like IBM.