Microsoft Misappropriation?
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US-based mobile email provider, Visto, is taking legal action against Microsoft claiming the monolith misappropriated its patented email system.

The company has also teamed up with Blackberry patent litigant NTP which is currently suing Canadian-based Research in Motion over similar technology.

The Visto complaint asserts that Microsoft has infringed on multiple patents regarding technology that provides access to their email and other data, which it developed “nearly a decade ago”.

Visto’s Chairman, CEO and President, Brian A. Bogosian pulled no punches saying, “Microsoft has a long and well-documented history of acquiring the technology of others, branding it as their own, and entering new markets. In some cases, they buy that technology from its creator. In other cases, they wrongfully misappropriate the intellectual property that belongs to others, which has forced them to acknowledge and settle large IP cases with companies like Sun, AT&T and Burst.com. For their foray into mobile email and data access, Microsoft simply decided to misappropriate Visto’s well known and documented patented technology.”

The system drives email from personal or business servers to mobile devices and allows users to access sensitive data and email stored behind highly secure corporate firewalls.

Co-founder Daniel M_ndez said “We worked many long nights over many years and invested heavily to develop and patent our technology at a time when many people thought we were working on future fantasies. Now, when the market potential is obvious to everyone, other companies want to misappropriate the technologies that we invented and to benefit, for free, from our hard work and innovation.

“For more than a decade, small, innovative companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have lived in fear of the day Microsoft decides to enter their market,” Bogosian said. “They are a big, powerful, wealthy company, but they have no real growth, even in their most profitable divisions. They want to show investors that they can sustain growth in a new, developing market, like mobile access to email and data, but they cannot be permitted to do that by misappropriating another company’s intellectual property,” he said.

The suit asserts Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5.0 infringes on Visto’s patented technology. In particular three patents titled; “System And Method For Securely Synchronizing Multiple Copies Of A Workspace Element In A Network”, “System And Method For Globally And Securely Accessing Unified Information In A Computer Network” and “System And Method For Using A Workspace Data Manager To Access, Manipulate And Synchronize Network Data”.