Shoutbox

Patchou it would do you good to read up some on Intellectual Property rights.

There are four types of protection for Intellectual Property:

- Copyrights
- Patents
- Trademarks
- Trade Secrets

Copyrights covers only your source code. Microsoft cannot copy your code and implement it into MSN messenger. Copyrights don't protect your ideas though. So Microsoft is free to implement a feature of plus as long as they don't copy any of your code.

Patents protect inventions and in the US software can also be patented. I doubt you have a patent on your software. It is a costly process. To protect your "genuine" features you would have to patent them.

Trademarks protect the term "Messenger Plus!" for example. Microsoft could not use this term because of Trademark protection

Trade Secrets protect secret business practices that are not publicly known. This protects against corporate espionage for example.

To sum up, Microsoft could if it wanted to implement some of the features that plus offers into MSN messenger as long as they don't copy your source code but develop the feature independently. Unless you have protected those features with patents of course which i believe isn't the case.
You are really naive if you think Microsoft only buys things but never steals anything. If they were only interested in going the legal route then they would not have been convicted to have illegaly leveraged their monopoly in the US and the EU.