“Seattle-based software company Infoflows has been awarded $20m in damages by a US Court, ending a three year dispute with Corbis,” Andrew Orlowski reports for The Register. “The judge decided that Corbis illegally stole Infoflows’ intellectual property – its software.”
“The names may not immediately mean much to you. But Corbis was founded in 1989 by William Henry Gates III – founder of Microsoft – who is the largest shareholder in the privately-owned company,” Orlowski reports. “Infoflows is a small Washington state company founded by former Microsoft product manager Steve Stone six years ago.”
“Infoflows had developed a license management system for digital assets, including images, called JazzSpider. The startup signed a license agreement with Corbis, and in December 2005 sent Corbis a PowerPoint slide of how the JazzSpider software worked. In June the following year, a licensing agreement between the two was signed,” Orlowski reports. “Infoflows then discovered that Corbis was patenting its own system based on what Infoflows saw as its own IP. “
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, a company founded by Bill Gates enters into an agreement with another company, gets access to that company’s IP, steals it, and begins selling it on its own. For some reason, this sounds strangely familiar…
Why the hell would any company be foolish enough to show ANYTHING to M$?
Reminds me of DOS.
Didn’t they “barrow” DOS from some other programmer and just switch around a couple of things.
No DOS, no contract with IBM. No IBM contract, no Microsoft.
Did Bill Gates turn it up side down so people would not know where they got their ideas from?
DOS, Apple’s Mac OS (original version), just to name two. Guess we see that once a thief, always a thief, no matter how you mask it in philanthropy.
Not defending Microsoft, but I believe Microsoft bought DOS for something like $70,000 (might have been slightly less) off of a hobbyist developer.
Why does this not surprise me? Why?
I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you.
What a modus operandi! They learn from their mother – Microsoft – one thing: R&D does not work but stealing works!!
A tiger cannot change its stripes. Gates seems incapable of dealing honorably with partners when there is opportunity to simply steal intellectual property. The man is skunk. Regardless of his attempts to cleanse his reputation via The Gates Foundation. A look at the Gates Foundation activities shows that it is not an entirely altruistic organization. Even here, Gates uses the Foundation to leverage actions, including political ones, that suit his need for control. Gates is a critically flawed man.
Someone should write Bill a letter explaining how Infoflows will have to stop innovating if people just steal their IP.
This is the same formula Gates used to develop Windows.
Microsoft and IBM were working as partners, nine-to-five to develop PS/2. Microsoft stalled and obfuscated the process until it had finished Windows and then abandoned the PS/2 project shortly afterwards.
@Adam T. Lindley
Yeah, but it was closer to 25k.
Bill Gates used to stomp his feet and whine at Harvard when people stole his software creations.
I mean it. He used to post warnings on the bulletin boards admonishing those who would dare copy, and not pay, for his software.
He knows exactly how it feels to be weaseled out of one’s intellectual property. That is the Hell that awaits Bill Gates
Let’s see, what was it that Ballmer told Robert Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet @ Xerox PARC and CEO of 3COM) back in the early ’90s? Oh yeah, “You made one mistake. You trusted us.”
Bill Gates is as irrelevant as Microsoft.
Ah yes — ask Ray Noorda, former CEO of Novell about such shenanigans — and let’s not forget Stack and their compression technologies that were heisted by Microsoft.
Niffy
G4Dualie writes, “Microsoft and IBM were working as partners, nine-to-five to develop PS/2. Microsoft stalled and obfuscated the process until it had finished Windows and then abandoned the PS/2 project shortly afterwards.”
You’re thinking of OS/2. Actually, Windows already existed, and OS/2 was intended as the next release of Windows. Microsoft indeed pulled out, stiffed IBM, and went ultimately to NT. Ironically, when the highly successful Windows 95 was released even Microsoft knew that the then current iteration of OS/2 was technically much superior.
This is from a 2002 Cringely column:
“This is far from a new story line. 3Com claimed that Microsoft did much the same thing with OS/2 LAN Manager (“You made a mistake, you trusted us,” said 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe, quoting an unnamed Microsoft executive.) Jerry Kaplan claimed Microsoft did exactly the same thing, stealing technology from Go Computer for its Windows for Pen Computing. Stac Electronics claimed that Microsoft stole disk compression technology from them in a similar manner, though in Stac’s case, it isn’t alleged: They took Microsoft to court and won. This is happening so often, I’d say there must be something to it.”
How can people keep falling for that one?
How about Sybase and SQL Server? It was going to be a partnership where Sybase was going to release the DB engine for UNIX and Microsoft the one for Windows. Once they got the IP, they said “Oops, no, no more partnership, no partner’s desk. Only one desk” (reminds me of Ocean’s 13, hehe!).
The got Sybase IP for themselves and repackaged it as Microsoft SQL Server.
Oops. I meant to say “any company owned by Gates”. Then again, to me, Gates will forever be linked to M$. Can’t seem to separate the two.
@DC
Yeah, I’m bit hazy on details. It’s been twenty-years or more.
However PS/2 was the newly minted IBM PC platform that was powered by OS/2. I refer to it and its OS as PS/2, much like I do Macintosh, wherein the OS and the hardware are synergistically joined at the hip.
And you’re right, up to that point Windows was just a shell and not an OS, whereas Windows 3.0 finally lofted Microsoft into prime time in 1990. The shame of it is, is Microsoft was diverting the money earmarked by IBM for OS/2s development, to offset ongoing development of Windows 95 and ultimately, NT.
It would seem the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in the Microsoft family…
Think of the arrogance, the inherent bullying nature, that underlies the kind of intellectual property shenanigans that MS has engaged in over the years. Microsoft knows it has deep pockets and can afford to engage in protracted intellectual property litigation that plays out over years (sometimes decades) with nary an effect on its balance sheet., Meanwhile, a small company that has its IP taken by MS is akin to a gnat on an elephant’s ass — and the gnat now has to focus its considerably smaller resources and attention to suing to protect its property. This is the kind of thing that can destroy a small, earnest company that was built on sweat, sacrifice and innovation.
^^ Yep, unfortunately for Microsoft the numbers of companies falling for it is quickly disappearing, especially now that there are other big players like Google and Apple to work with instead. The rug is beginning to twitch under their feet. Can’t be too long before someone starts to pull it out properly.
@Raymond in DC
“You’re thinking of OS/2. Actually, Windows already existed, and OS/2 was intended as the next release of Windows. Microsoft indeed pulled out, stiffed IBM, and went ultimately to NT.”
Actually, you’re both wrong. OS/2 existed as “Protected Mode DOS”
long before Windows was even imagined. It was continuously renamed “PMDos 4”, “5”, and finally “OS/2” after IBM became interested in it for their PS/2 line. It was NEVER intended to be “The next release of Windows”. OS/2 was for Business, Windows would run on DOS for Personal computers. OS/2 NewTechnology was to be a mobile version of OS/2 done predominantly by MS, but when Windows took off, MS wanted the Windows GUI on OS/2 NT, and IBM wanted the Presentation Manager GUI on it, so MS pulled out and took their football and went home to hire Dave Cuttler to rebuild OS/2 NT into Windows NT. MS says there was no OS/2 in NT… That’s why when NT bombed out, you got a messages that said “OS/2 error….blah, blah, blah” – they couldn’t even tell the truth about that!