Over the weekend, Dwight Silverman asked: “Does Microsoft know there’s already a Windows Defender out there?” I answered hypothetically:
Microsoft has an army of lawyers, and one would have to assume that no product naming decision gets publicly announced until there’s been a thorough trademark search.
Todd Bishop of the Seattle P-I says that assumption was right. He tracked down the developer of the original Windows Defender program, 22-year-old Adam Lyttle from Adelaide, Australia:
Lyttle wasn’t inclined to get into a legal tussle with the software giant and its army of lawyers. For one thing, he had stopped working on his Windows Defender program nearly a year before that point.
He was puzzled by one element of the agreement, which gives to Microsoft all rights to the Windows Defender name. However, after consulting with a friend in law school, he decided to just sign it and move on.
The story doesn’t make Microsoft look very good.
Thanks for following up, Todd!
Ed Bott 
Ahem… as I told you in the last post
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1132#comments
“Well,
probably Microsoft did what they usually do. They buy for cheap and sell for a lot.
But that’s business, isn’t it? “
“The story doesn’t make Microsoft look very good.”
Really? Did you read the whole article?
Yeah, I read the whole thing. My comment is about perception. There may be a legitimate business reason for the way this was done, but it still looks like big bad corporation abusing poor little software developer.
Trademark infringement, ya right. There is lots of software that begins with the common term “Windows”. Is Microsoft going after each and every one of them for trademark infringement? They hosed this guy, plain and simple.