Marc Benioff was never likely to take being accused of patent infringement by Microsoft, but now the Salesforce.com CEO is taking the fight back to the firm he dubs a “patent troll” with his own patent infringement accusations.
A number of Microsoft products, including its .NET platform and SharePoint collaboration software, are in violation of Salesforce.com patents, according to the complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The complaint states that the "risk of infringement was either known or so obvious that it should have been known by Microsoft."
Microsoft has willfully infringed on Salesforce.com's intellectual property, the complaint adds. "Microsoft's continuing acts of infringement have caused and are causing irreparable harm to Salesforce.com," the complaint said.
Specifically Salesforce.com says Microsoft infringed on five of its patents, including claims that:
- Microsoft violated Salesforce's cache-management patent in Windows Server AppFabric.
- Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 infringed on a patent for error reporting.
- Microsoft's collaboration software SharePoint infringed on a patent for Web-based work sharing.
- Two other claims involve Windows Live and Microsoft's .NET platform.
Salesforce.com is rolling out the big guns to help it. Salesforce.com's legal team on the case includes David Boies, known for his role prosecuting the U.S. government's antitrust case against Microsoft. Boies is also representing Oracle in its ongoing intellectual-property suit against SAP.
Microsoft released a statement from deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez saying the company is reviewing the new case. "We remain confident about our position and will continue to press ahead with the complaint we initiated in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington," he said.
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