A Guatemalan inventor claims Microsoft is illegally using his
software to transfer information between its spreadsheet products
Excel and Access.
Carlos Armando Amado says he filed a patent in 1990 for software
which lets users move data between Excel to Access via a
spreadsheet. He tried to sell it to Microsoft two years later,
according to Reuters.
Amado claims Microsoft started using his technology in Access
releases from 1995 to 2002. Microsoft deny this saying they started
working on the technology in 1989 - three years before Amado came
to see them.
The suit does not claim specific damages but lawyers told
Reuters they would be asking for about $2 for every copy of the
software sold, which equates to $500m. The case is being heard in
the US District Court of Central California.
Microsoft is also facing patent claims over Longhorn, the next
version of Windows, from networking company Alacritech. It is also
being sued by Forgent Networks which claims the software giant
broke its JPEG picture compression patents.
