After last month's Burst fiasco, Microsoft finds itself on the wrong side of a law suit once again.
This time it is a data-networking firm called Alacritech, which claims that Microsoft has infringed on the copyrights of the session-layer interface control (SLIC) technology to speed up data flow across computer networks.
Alacritech claims that this technology has been coded into the Microsoft Chimney and Longhorn products.
A US District Court in San Francisco has admitted a preliminary injunction against Microsoft that will prevent it from, "making, using, offering for sale, selling, importing or inducing others to use Microsoft's Chimney or Longhorn software." This ruling puts a question mark on whether Longhorn, designated as the next generation operating system, will have to be shelved.
Commenting on the injunction, Larry Boucher, president of Alacritech, said, "After Alacritech discovered that Microsoft Chimney is based on intellectual property that we developed, patented and own, we offered Microsoft a license.
Microsoft rejected licensing terms that would be acceptable to us. We were forced to sue Microsoft to stop it from continuing to infringe, and inducing others to infringe, our intellectual property rights." Boucher claims that Alacritech invented the software in 1997 and approached Microsoft in 1998 to see if an agreement could be reached whereby both companies would collaborate on developing it further. He alleges that Microsoft never got back to Alacritech on the issue and hence the lawsuit.
Microsoft can appeal in 21 days.
