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Microsoft Wins Summary Judgement in Smart Tag Case
dan2bit writes "Business Week reports that a judge in Wisconsin handed down a summary judgement today in favor of Microsoft, defending itself from a patent infringement suit brought by small fish Hyperphrase over the embedding of 'Smart Tags' in Microsoft Office. The suit also produced some amusing minutiae."
The concept behind SmartTags is hardly new - one well-known (at least in hypermedia research, which happens to be my area) example would be 'generic link' found in the Microcosm open hypermedia system, which was first published in Andrew M. Fountain, Wendy Hall, Ian Heath, Hugh C. Davis: MICROCOSM: An Open Model for Hypermedia with Dynamic Linking. ECHT 1990: 298-311.
The generic link designates a link with a selection as source (this would in the simplest case be a string, but could be e.g. a image) and a specific destination. Thus, whereever the selection is encountered, there is a link to the destination. This functionality has been reimplemented a number of times in various open hypermedia systems.
--- In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro
Lawyers use all caps in certain parts of legal documents because they believe that caps emphasizes whatever they capitalize. However, it's not random -- 99.9% of the time, the text that's capitalized is required or strongly suggested to be included in such a document by law or caselaw. It has little to do with making the document "binding."
For those that argue that people just skip over the text because it's hard to read or it's like yelling, well, that's a silly argument, and no court would accept that as an excuse for avoiding the results of whatever the text said. The point is that the text is set off from the rest of the document -- if you skip it, you still noticed it, and it's your fault for skipping it.
Think about it this way: you wouldn't argue that a warning siren is useless because it sounds really harsh, and naturally you put your hands over your ears to avoid hearing it, and therefore the warning siren doesn't actually do what it's supposed to do.
I fail to see the reason for sarcasm. Yes, it sounds like in this case, punctuality may not have mattered. But in other cases, the difference between 11:59pm and 12:01am could be billions of dollars.
When a court sets a deadline, people should be expected to stick to it. If, in this case, the court decided that it wanted to ignore its own deadline, that's its choice. But would have been perfectly acceptable and entirely reasonable for it to throw out any documents submitted even a second late.
"If MS loses, they will bitch about stupid patent laws."
Microsoft has quite the double standard here on Slashdot. Everybody wants MS punished. They want to see MS hurt. Unfortunately, it is rare that anybody puts any thought into the consequences of punishing Microsoft. Just like you brought up here, it was probably better for Microsoft to win instead of lose. When the Blaster worm made its rounds, people here were saying "Why isn't Microsoft being held liable?" Sounds great, doesn't it? Make Microsoft pay for their 'negligence'. Never mind that somebody was getting away with being a malicious asshole and Microsoft was being punished for it, no no no, Microsoft should be punished for not being pyschic and predicting that an exploit would be.. uh. exploited. If Microsoft were to be liable for defects like that, then in all fairness, individuals of the OSS Community would risk being liable for somebody else's malicious use. So, in short, Linux could find itself vulernable to whatever punishment is dealt to Microsoft in a case like that.
Be careful about what you wish for. If you want Microsoft to be punished, that's perfectly okay, just be careful that they don't get punished in a way that burns you.
"Derp de derp."
Wounded though this court may be by Microsoft's four minute and twenty-seven second dereliction of duty, it will transcend the affront and forgive the tardiness. Indeed, to demonstrate the even-handedness of its magnanimity, the court will allow Hyperphrase on some future occasion in this case to e-file a motion four minutes and thirty seconds late, with supporting documents to follow up to seventy-two minutes later.
Having spent more than that amount of time on Hyperphrase's motion, it is now time to move on to the other Gordian problems confronting this court. Plaintiff's motion to strike is denied.
"I think the U.N. is going to find that the blame lies with all the Sudanese rap music that glamorizes genocide."
Ogg is a container format. As far as I know, no one is seriously claiming patent protection on the idea of a container format.
Vorbis is a codec that does the same job as MP3 (only better). The Ogg guys worked very hard, with lawyers vetting the code at each stage of development, to make darn sure that no patents apply to anything in Vorbis. It would have been done a lot sooner if they hadn't had to do this.
Theora is a video codec, based on a video codec called VP3. The guys who developed VP3, On2, have patents that cover VP3, and they signed a complete and irrevokable release to allow Theora to be completely free software. I think Theora is what you were thinking of.
And the Ogg code is available under a BSD license, to speed the adoption by commercial entities. Originally they were using LGPL but enough people were worried about viral IP issues that they went to the BSD license.
<pedantic>
And it's codec or codecs, not codex. A codex is a book.
</pedantic>
Want to know more? Check out the Ogg page at xiph.org.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely