Protecting our Intellectual Property with Microsoft

With a 22 percent increase in cloud-based IP lawsuits over the last five years in the U.S., according to Boston Consulting Group, Smith says it’s important to address “the growing risk of intellectual property lawsuits in the cloud.”

One of the main reasons behind the creation of this new program is to help address the risk of patent infringement that impacts many companies who are moving to or have become a digital business as use of the cloud has increased over the last several years.

“Our goal is to help foster a community that values and protects innovation and investments in the cloud. We want software developers to be able to focus on coding, and businesses and enterprises to be able to respond to the changing needs of their customers with agility without worrying about lawsuits.”

Microsoft’s decision behind this program is supported by the numbers as well.

Smith shared in the announcement blog post that more than $1 trillion dollars will be spent on IT by the year 2020 (Gartner report), that there has been a 22% increase in cloud-based IP cases over the last five years in the US, and that non-practicing entities have increased the acquisition of cloud-related patents by 35% over that same five year period (last two stats from the Boston Consulting Group).

As spending in cloud continues to rise it stands to reason that litigation around and the acquisition of cloud-related patents will also continue that same upward trend.

We Pulse Medic and @symbol7th are part of Microsoft’s Azure IP Advantage and take our cloud as serious as we do patient care as Digital Health Medics.

Microsoft best-in-industry intellectual property protection with uncapped indemnification coverage will now also cover any open source technology that powers Microsoft Azure services, such as Hadoop used for Azure HD Insight.

Microsoft patents make 10,000 patents available to customers that use Azure services for the sole purpose of enabling them to better defend themselves against patent lawsuits against their services that run on top of Azure. These patents are broadly representative of Microsoft’s overall patent portfolio and are the result of years of cutting-edge innovation by our best engineers around the world.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-broadens-patent-protection-for-cloud-customers-1486562400