Microsoft Azure IP Advantage

2017: Announcement

In February, 2017 the Microsoft company announced the protection program of users of Azure from patent trolls. The Softerny giant of protection against legal prosecution of clients who use technologies open source (Open Source) in Azure services.

Users of a cloud platform of Microosft Azure in case of patent trials will be able to rely on 10 thousand patents of Microsoft as though it is their intellectual property. In total the American corporation has about 65 thousand patents registered in the different countries of the world (data for February, 2017).

Office Microsoft

Clients who monthly spend not less than $1000 in Azure will be able to use the new initiative which received the name Microsoft Azure IP Advantage. Such the majority, assure of Microsoft.

Microsoft Azure IP Advantage assumes an unlimited covering of legal costs and legal aid for the clients developing cloud applicaions on the basis of the technologies open source used in Azure.

Protection will extend also to the non-commercial developments used by Azure. In particular, it is about Hadoop.months technology based on which the Azure HD Insight service is constructed.

We want that software developers could focus on writing of the code, and business companies could react quickly to needs of the clients, without being afraid of legal claims, says Microsoft.

The new program, first of all, is focused on the companies connected to Azure which are not working in the IT industry (for example, car makers) and therefore not holding patents in the field of mobile or cloud computing.

They had no so many years to create such portfolio of patents, as at us. Innovations in the field of cloud computing are too important to be suppressed claims — the corporate vice president of Microsoft Julia White said.[1]

The analyst of Forrester Research Jeffrey Hammond called Microsoft Azure IP Advantage the first initiative in own way and noted that the legal prosecutions connected with use of intellectual property on the basis of open cloud computing happen not often, however the new program of corporation will help it to attract more clients, especially those who do not wish to risk.

Patent trolls are called firms which do not conduct any productive activity, but own a wide portfolio of various patents which use for prosecution of other business companies in court, in hope for receiving compensation or patent payments. Especially hard in this sense it is necessary the innovative companies, facing that their new technologies are allegedly described in some patents dated even the last century. Descriptions can be indistinct and inconcrete, but quite specific is an amount which the patentee will request through court.

"Patent trolls" is a problem which already assumes a macroeconomic scale, - Ksenia Shilak, the representative of Sec-Consult company comments. - Practically any innovative companies risk to face claims of the structures parasitizing on someone else's intellectual property sooner or later. The idea of patent law consists in protection and maintenance of technology progress, however in today's conditions "patent trolls" pervert this idea to the complete antithesis. The step of Microsoft in this plan can only be welcomed.

• Licensing of software
• Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, the Act against Internet piracy)
• The pirated software in Russia (Unlicensed software)
• Software Asset Management (SAM)

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