Patent holder, inventor, and blogger, Gary Odom has sued Microsoft in a Californiia court for patent infringement. The patent is a “System for Demultiplexing a First Sequence of Packet Components to Identify Specific Components Wherein Subsequent Components are Processed without Re-Identifying Components ”
What is he talking about? It is about the Office 2007 ribbons which are part of the software’s formatting feature.
The complain alleges that the ribbon tool is an integral part of Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008.
Gary Odom
Gary Odom, who blogs under the name Patent Hawk, has also sued over 28 other firms for patent infringement.
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According to his lawyer, Ed Goldstein, the 28 targets of the lawsuit all have different software products nevertheless they all have one important similarity—they allow manipulation of tool groups instead of changing the entire toolbar or individual tools.
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Gary Odom’s company, Implicit Networks, is currently going after Intel, AMD, and NVidia among others that are guilty of Patent Infringement. Many other infringers are CAD and draw program developers, where many tools are used, so active tool groups is especially helpful in product or project development.
Mr. Odom’s charge is especially directed at large companies, not the small “mom and pop” operations where patent infringment lawsuits would be too costly to defend. In those cases, he would be willing to offer licenses in order to stave off any legal action against those companies.
In April, 2009, he posted on his blog:
“I have a licensing program in place. I’m looking forward to talking with each of the parties, and being equitable in consideration of how extensively they use the claimed invention, and what constitutes a reasonable royalty, with all due respect to the long-standing Georgia-Pacific factors and the commonly applied Goldscheider 25% rule.
I solicit any potentially infringing company out there to contact me or my attorneys to begin licensing negotiations. It may potentially save them a lot of headache and money to take a license.
If I’m contacted by a company and they don’t infringe, I’ll tell them straight out that they don’t need a license. In this campaign, I’ve looked at many companies with the Ribbon interface that don’t infringe, or appear so small, mom-and-pop operations, that a patent license could be a serious bite into their livelihood. Those folks are off my radar. For me, being appropriate in asserting patent rights is the way to be.”
As to why he chose a California venue for his latest lawsuit against Microsoft it is unclear, since he appeas to have sued Microsoft before for the same patent infringement that he claims to have occured now.
