Mobile E-mail Firm Visto Sues Microsoft

UPDATED Just one day after it signed a licensing agreement with RIM rival NTP, wireless e-mail technology maker Visto announced on Thursday that it had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft. The suit claims that Windows Mobile 5.0 is a "blatant infringement" on Visto technology.

Microsoft told BetaNews Wednesday that while it could not comment on the suit as the company had not yet reviewed the complaint, it wished "to underscore that Microsoft stands behind its products and respects the intellectual property rights of others."

At issue is the method Windows Mobile 5.0 uses in order to synchronize mobile data and e-mail with an Exchange server.

Specifically, Visto has accused Microsoft of infringing on three patents, including the system and methods to securely synchronize copies of a workspace element in a network, to access this data from a computer network, and the system and method to use a data manager to access, manipulate and synchronize this data.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, seeks an injunction to prevent Microsoft from further infringement on Visto's patents, and seeks unspecified monetary damages.

Visto CEO Brian Bogosian says this isn't the first time Microsoft has attempted to appropriate another company's technology and sell it as its own, pointing to cases involving Sun, AT&T and Burst.com.

"Microsoft has a long and sordid history when it comes to competing in the marketplace," he told reporters in a conference call announcing the suit Thursday afternoon.

Visto says it has been developing the technologies Microsoft illegally used in Windows Mobile 5.0 for nearly a decade. While Bogosian acknowledged that the rest of the industry had caught up to the company's work, there are companies that are not properly licensing Visto's technology.

"They claim it is an innovation. It is not," he said. "We are prepared to defend what is ours." Bogosian declined to comment whether or not Visto had its sights on any other companies that could potentially be infringing on the company's patents.

Microsoft was not contacted before the suit was filed, Bogosian admitted when questioned by BetaNews during the conference call. However, he argued the company had its reasons not to approach Redmond first.

"It was very clear to us that they knew about this. Their blatant disregard for our intellectual property, we felt it was very black and white," he said. "We also felt based on their past track record they likely wouldn't take any of our claims very seriously."

Bogosian also raised the specters of Netscape and RealNetworks as examples of Microsoft's tactics to bully competitors out of the market, arguing courts had repeatedly sided against the software giant.

"They are a big, powerful, wealthy company, but they have no real growth, even in their most profitable divisions," Bogosian chided. "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."