Fergie's Tech Blog

Microsoft Wins Suit Over Antipiracy Patent

Declan McCullagh writes on C|Net News:

A Texas lawyer has lost a patent lawsuit over antipiracy technology embedded in Microsoft's product activation program.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed a district court's decision, which said that Microsoft did not infringe on Kenneth Nash's patent for detecting pirated software by assigning each program a unique ID and verifying it over the Internet.

The dispute involves patent 6,449,645. It describes how to collect the unique ID--such as a serial number or activation key--assigned to each computer in an Internet database, preferably without the user's knowledge, and checking for multiple copies of the same program running. That could let it flag two friends who were illegally running, say, a video game with the same activation key.

posted by Fergie @ 3/27/2006 04:47:00 PM