InterTrust Props Up Microsoft Lawsuit

InterTrust Technologies announced today that it has added three new patents to the patent-infringement lawsuit it filed against Microsoft in April. The filing amendment alleges that Microsoft's .NET Framework infringes on several InterTrust patents; the original lawsuit dealt specifically with similar issues regarding Windows XP and Product Activation. According to the suit, Microsoft is purportedly violating seven InterTrust patents and at least 50 patent claims.

"Our approach in this litigation has been to carefully study how Microsoft uses security and trust-management technology in its products and services and to compare those implementations to our many issued patent claims," said Ed Fish, president of InterTrust's MetaTrust Utility Division. "The more we've been able to do this, the more it becomes evident that Microsoft is merely adopting technologies long ago patented by InterTrust... This infringement serves to validate the importance of InterTrust's business mission and our patent assets."

The new claims are based on patents filed in 1995 and deal with .NET assemblies, which are building-block software components that companies can distribute across the Internet. InterTrust says that it patented this technology in the early 1990s. The company bills itself as a pioneer in Digital Rights Management technologies.