Microsoft sued in China for patent infringement

A CHINESE Internet company has sued Microsoft for patent infringement over its use of RSS* in Windows Vista.

Wang Jianbo, chairman of China E-commerce Info Tech Company, said his firm applied for a patent on RSS services in 2005 and was granted patent ZL 2005 1 0022721.3 in December 2007 from China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO). Wang says Microsoft adopted RSS technology in Vista without his company's authorisation.

Information on SIPO's website indicates that the patent in question covers " an XML-based RSS information interactive processing approach".

China E-commerce is based in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, and the Xi'an Intermediate People's Court reportedly has accepted the case for adjudication. China E-commerce's lawsuit asks that Microsoft either stop infringing its RSS patent or stop selling Windows Vista in China.

Microsoft reportedly filed its response in the case last Friday, denying the lawsuit's claims.

Microsoft, the Big Media music and film MAFIAAs, and many others have long complained about rampant and endemic intellectual property infringement in China, where upwards of 75 per cent of all software and entertainment media files flogged are unauthorised copies.

This little Chinese legal drama will be fun to watch and likely take quite a while to play out. µ

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*RSS is a family of feeds used for publishing online content – like bog entries, news items, and even audio and video streams – over the Internet in a standard format. The acronym RSS variously stands for Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91), RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) or Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0). RDF stands for the W3C Resource Description Framework construct definition.