Scumbag Microsoft "patent troll" lawsuit fails (GOOD!)

In article
,
Whisky-dave wrote:

On Dec 13, 7:35*pm, Bruce wrote:
Rich wrote:
These people are the scum of the Earth. *They buy up patents, not
intending to do anything with them, produce any products. *They then
wait for some company to marginally infringe (or not, in this case) on
the patent through their own innovation, and they sue them. *That is
how they make their money, through lawsuits. *It's a sad comment on
the state of some business in the U.S. that a completely unproductive
company can do this. *There have been articles about these vermin in
various technology periodicals. *I hope Allen gets the message, or hit
by a bus, whichever.

BBC:
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has had his lawsuit against a number
of tech and online retail firms thrown out.

In August, Mr Allen claimed the firms - including Google, eBay, Apple
and Facebook - had infringed patents held by his firm Interval
Licensing.

It is no worse than people who register as a trademark in one country
the name of a company from another country, then extract huge sums of
money to sell that company their own name back when they want to trade
in the first country.

Also, it is no worse than people who registered domains in the name of
companies so when those companies later decided to have a web site,
they found "their" domain name was already owned by someone else.

For example, Google couldn't offer "gmail" in the UK because there was
already a service provider of that name. *For several years, UK
holders of Google mail accounts had to use ".

I'm not sure that's true when I signed up for googlemail in oct 2004
the beta
I had this gmail.com address, if I wanted a UK one it had to be
googlemail.co.uk.
I wasn't fussed about a .co.uk so maybe it was gmail.co.uk that was
owned by someone else.

According to the whois database, gmail.co.uk was registered by Google
(US) on March 6, 1998:

Domain name:
gmail.co.uk

Registrant:
Google Inc.

Registrant's address:
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View
CA
94043
United States

Relevant dates:
Registered on: 06-Mar-1998
Renewal date: 06-Mar-2012
Last updated: 15-Mar-2010

And also according to the same database, googlemail.co.uk wasn't
registered until 2004:

Domain name:
googlemail.co.uk

Registrant:
Google Inc.

Registrant type:
Unknown

Registrant's address:
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View
CA
94043
United States

Relevant dates:
Registered on: 19-Jan-2004
Renewal date: 19-Jan-2012
Last updated: 18-Jan-2010