Microsoft Suing TomTom NV On The Basis Of CII Patents

Microsoft Corp. yesterday has filed a patent infringement action against TomTom NV and Tom Tom, Inc.:

"Microsoft has filed an action [...] in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and in the International Trade Commission (ITC), against TomTom NV and TomTom Inc. for infringement of Microsoft patents. We have taken this action after attempting for more than a year to engage in licensing discussions with TomTom."

TomTom is a manufacturer of navigation devices. See also this report on Heise Newsticker [Sorry, in German only]. They also provide a list of U.S. patent numbers involved in that case (I haven't checked that!). The case has been filed in the U.S. on the basis of U.S. patents and U.S. law.

However, surely this case might perhaps cause some discussion on the effects of patents on computer-implemented inventions; the Heise report says that the TomTom devices in question are basically based on some flavour of Linux (I haven't checked that!). What would happen if such court action were mooted in Europe?

Here is the result of a brief patent family analysis in order to check out any potentiual diffrerences between the U.S. theatre and a hypothetical European theatre:

It certainly would be welcome if any political debate of the wider implications of this case would concentrate on the language of the claims as granted, not as applied for, in the different jurisdictions, ad surely not on the wording of the abstract.

Probably the case is not about Linux as long as something like a standard kernel is considered. Building a navigation system on top of a Linux kernel is quite another matter, I suppose. The FAT-related patent ("Common name space for long and short filenames") is, however, a known issue. But, as far as I know, patent EP000000618540B1 has been declared invalid with regatd to its German part in 2007 due to lack of inventive step.