Obviously wrong
So Microsoft is suing Barnes & Noble for patent infringement. Well, that’s what patents are for: the right to sue. And that’s what licenses are for: the right to avoid getting sued. The only thing is, if you’re going to sue someone with half a brain, you should at least make sure your patent is reasonably solid.
With that said, one of the patents that Microsoft claims that Nook is violating deals with annotating documents, an area I know a bit about. The patent, filed in December 1999, claims a system and method to associate annotations with a non-modifiable document. The idea is that file positions in the document associated with user-selected objects are used to retrieve annotations from some other location, and to display these annotations for the user.
Sounds obvious, no? So obvious, in fact, that when we built such a system in 1997, we didn’t bother patenting this.