Daniel Ravicher, the executive director of PubPat, frets that companies might not adopt IPv6 because of Microsoft's patent. "Microsoft won't ever assert this patent - they know it's worthless. But there will still be people who are afraid of it - if someone has a gun and promises not to shoot it, it's still scary." Never mind that IPv6 is already implemented on Windows, Macintosh, Unix and Linux, without Microsoft so much as saying "boo".

For those still cowering in the network addressing closet over 6,101,499, come on out. Microsoft has zero track record of cocking a software patent shotgun. If Microsoft were in the business of asserting software patents, Linux would have been gut-shot and bled to death a long time ago.

"The right thing for Microsoft to do is to abandon the patent and acknowledge that it should never have been granted in the first place," said Ravicher. Needless to say, Mr. Ravicher did not enjoy a successful career in corporate public relations. If Danny Boy had suggested Microsoft donate this patent to the public domain, as IBM has ballyhooed it would for a few patents in its portfolio, he might have hit a note, but not likely.

David Kaefer, Microsoft's czar for intellectual property licensing, retorts about tattletale PubPat: "This isn't the first time we've seen these groups [the Public Patent Foundation and the Software Freedom Law Center] make accusations about Microsoft patents. It's been the case before that people have offered misleading claims, primarily because those people oppose software patents but use issues like this one to sow uncertainty about the patent process itself."

PubPat Executive Director Dan Ravicher then proceeded to shove his shoe into his mouth with: "We didn't complain about this. Private companies complained about this first. We weren't the ones to raise the yellow flag. [Microsoft is trying to put my organization and [the Software Freedom Law Center] in the middle." Damn those scurrilous "private companies". Clearly Dan does not like being in the middle, preferring the aisle or window seat for his flights of fantasy.

The smear is that Microsoft failed to disclose prior art from the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), a committee that Microsoft sat in on. More particularly, raves Ravicher: "Some of the names of inventors on the patents were involved in the committee." Imagine engineers interested in a particular technology on a committee, then filing a patent. Sounds cagey. Sounds like Rambus (see the recent story in The Patent Prospector).

Hoof-in-mouth Ravicher frothed that PUBPAT's investigations have uncovered several references to the technology that count as prior art to the patent. Wow, that's never been done before - finding prior art on a patent. There must be something to this.