Supreme Court Appears Leaning Microsoft's Way in AT&T Patent Dispute

February 21, 2007

Earlier today a U.S. Supreme Court justice indicated his doubts about whether Microsoft is infringing on AT&T patents related to Windows software sold overseas.

Justice Stephen Breyer seemed to be skeptical about AT&T's point that software code could be deemed a "component" of a computer. If software is a component, that would make overseas sales of the software an infringement under U.S. patent law.

The question here is a ruling upholding a lower court decision that Microsoft is liable for infringing an AT&T patent for converting speech into computer code in copies of the Windows computer operating system sold overseas.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in its ruling that Microsoft was liable for the unauthorized distribution of codec technology, used to compress speech signals into data, in copies of Windows overseas.

But today, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said he would be "quite frightened of deciding for you and discovering that all over the world there are vast numbers of inventions that really can be thought of in the same way that you're thinking of this one."

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