Micro$oft and patents

I’m not a huge fan of Andew Orlowski - while he comes up with a fair amount of interesting stuff in The Register, he’s also not above the occasional troll blog-wards. OK, the signal-to-noise ratio isn’t always brilliant, but the same goes for magazines.

But this got me thinking - if something is an open standard, at what point does it cease to be possible to slap a patent on the technology and shut down its adoption or use by punative licensing fees?

And more to the point, what’s to stop someone - e.g. Micro$oft - with infinitely deep pockets and a market share under threat from legislating its competition out of business? It wouldn’t exactly be out of character, after all. But if I can go back and patent something as blatently covered by prior art as applet plug-ins in browsers, what’s to stop the good guys doing the same thing, and turning the patent over to the public domain?

Update - someone’s thought of this…

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