Microsoft vs Motorola lawsuit

Microsoft has sued Motorola on patent infringement in their Android mobile phone. Patents involved cover the usual, obvious "inventions", like sync'ing emails from a computer to a mobile phone, the long-filename extension their old FAT file system and others. Microsoft's Corporate Vice President writes in his blogpost:

"Synchronization Technology on Mobile Phones is a patented invention"

Emails and basically all sorts of files have been sync'ed between all computers of the internet for 30 years now ("mirrors" exist as long as computer networks). The idea to synchronize emails and contacts from a computer to a mobile phone must be so totally obvious to anyone with only a very superfluous knowledge of computers that Microsoft should never be able to win this in court.

Unfortunately, judges and lawyers hardly know how to use Microsoft Word and are therefore ready to buy this "we’ve spent over 30 years developing cutting-edge computer software"-nonsense.They really believe that Microsoft has been developing "cutting-edge" computer software. If you have never used a mainframe, never programmed a home computer in the 80s, have no idea of how DOS stole from everyone else, or how Windows 2.11 was just a copy of various parts copied from Apple's Lisa, Xerox Alto, GEM, and others, then you might even believe that syncing emails is a non-obvious "invention". I doubt that this patent has ever been seriously challenged in court (and the same goes for the other eight patents).

All developers of mobile phones infringe many of Microsoft patents. I think it is clear what Motorola should do: first put all of their own trivial software patents into the public domain, then contact other software companies and collect money to get these Microsoft patents invalidated in court, then make a case and lobby members of congress to build more checks and balances into the US patent system. The current way to deal with these patents is just an enormous waste of time and money. It's Microsoft who is currently exploiting it, but very soon it will be another company again. (see also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft-motorola-android-patent-lawsuit)