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You realize all of Microsoft's patents are public, right? That's the deal with patents: you publish them in order to get a temporary monopoly. There is little significant data that B&N could threaten to "disclose" that you couldn't find by doing an assignee search on the USPTO website. They may have patents assigned to shell companies, IV-style, but their negotiation power comes from having a very visible humongous portfolio, and using shell companies would just make it less visible. Maybe B&N could "disclose" what patents MS is licensing related to Android, but you could make a good guess of those too by filtering the previous list of patents for keywords related to mobile and operating systems. B&N had jack squat on MS in this lawsuit, which is why they made a big noise about antitrust, which of course went nowhere. I suspect you've been getting your info from Groklaw, which could explain a lot of misconceptions around here. > Something that makes very little sense. How does a content deal not make sense in today's world? It is exactly to prevent the "erosion" of their ecosystem. The ecosystem today is so much more than PCs. They don't want people to go somewhere else (like, say, iTunes or Amazon) to get their content, because that's a very strong lure to join another ecosystem. Every major player is out there making content deals to tie into their ecosystem, and MS is right up there with them... Except ebooks was the glaring hole in their content story. And it's not going to be attached to just Windows, but to their phone, tablet and cloud offerings too. As to the strength of their patents, you just gotta look at who is getting injunctions and who is getting paid in the "smartphone wars". Nobody's getting any lasting injunctions, but MS has been getting paid all over. (OK, Apple got that one big win over Samsung, but it's still up in the air.) Just for some disclosure, I've been tangentially involved in patent licensing efforts for a small firm. It is very, very difficult to get any licensing from big firms, who would prefer to role the dice in court if there's the slightest chance they can win or out-lawyer you. Given that, I find it impressive how many royalty-bearing licenses MS has managed to get in the past few years. Including, of all things, Foxconn. |