Last week, the US Department of Justice send out civil subpoenas to 150
software and hardware companies with questions for the companies dealing with
their relationship with Microsoft, in particular, Microsoft's practice of
requiring companies that license Windows 95 to refrain from bringing patent
infringement lawsuits against Microsoft or other licensees.  Supposedly some
of these companies had complained to the Justice Department that such a
licensing requirement was an unfair restraint on their businesses.

    Microsoft's defense of this licensing requirement is that it didn't want
to get involved when one Microsoft OEM sued another Microsoft OEM over
technology running on Windows 95 where Windows 95 itself wasn't involved in
the infringement.  Such reasoning could justify signing a contract agreeing
not to sue Microsoft, but is more of a stretch to justify not being able to
sue other Windows 95 licensees.

    I wonder how many other big software companies have similar restrictions
in their licensing contracts.

Greg Aharonian
Internet Patent News Service
P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA, 02178
617-489-3727,  pate...@world.std.com
(for info on free subscription, send 'help' to   pate...@world.std.com )
(for prior art search services info, send 'prior' to pate...@world.std.com )
(for WWW patent searching, try  http://sunsite.unc.edu/patents/intropat.html )