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MS Files For NZ Patent On XML Word Processor Files
heretic108 writes "A patent application is currently being examined in New Zealand, which if granted, would bar anyone except Microsoft from using an XML file format for storing Word Processing documents. In contrast to copyrights, patents allow even the most elementary concepts to be patented. Apparently, nobody here is diligently watching out for such ridiculous patents, so the official deadline for submitting objections has passed. This suggests a likelihood that the patent may well be granted. I am not endeared to the thought that I might be breaking the law when I use OpenOffice.org to write documents, especially since the concept of storing docs in an XML format was certainly not thought of by Microsoft, so have written a formal complaint to my Member of Parliament. Hopefully there'll be a public outcry within New Zealand."
Other word processors do XML, and have been doing it. It can probably be overturned.
This sig no verb.
Web pages are, in essence, word-processed, and they were one of the first demonstrated uses of the XML format. They include all the features word-processed documents would require, including formatting and font information. I can't see how any judge could overlook this as prior art.
Apparently, nobody here is diligently watching out for such ridiculous patents.
When challenged by reporters over the volume of prior art which negates this patent, a Microsoft spokesperson replied "Apparently, everybody here is too patently ridiculous to be diligently watching out."
The title of a patent is worthless. Patents are all about the implementation, and we know nothing about what Microsoft is claiming here.
Honestly, the story rebuts itself:
"Without knowing what is in the patent in detail means it is somewhat difficult to provide a meaningfull objection. "
Quote from the Wikipedia on XML: "Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured text".
It was designed for the storage of structured text. A word processor creates structured text. It is sort of logical to use the technology that was designed to store what you are creating. How is that being innovative or original? If they were using some other technology for this and it was not designed for this usage then maybe they would have a case.
This is like someone creating and image format and Adobe taking out the patent to save documents in that format. It is dumb.
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Complaints ought to be listened to both before and after the patent is granted. If obvious (OO.org) examples (*.sx?) of prior art are found, the patent office ought to revoke the patent, even if it's already been granted. If the company (patent owners are always companies, hmm...) doesn't like it, they should have to sue.
Litigious bastards
Here's the webpage of the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office listing the patent application. Unfortunately, it does not appear to have online the most crucial thing we're all looking for - nitty-gritty details of the patent.
This is misleading or false. Copyrights do not protect concepts or ideas. A copyright protects a specific expression of an idea. Plagiarizing a copyrighted idea is completely legal.
Patents protect ideas; copyrights protect the way they are presented.
I'd always thought you had to patent before it entered the public domain
Seems to me that the only way MS can combat the wide acceptance of Linux is to make it illegal to use Linux. They realize that software superiority is something they can not achieve, so the only option they have is to leverage their monopoly power, vast hordes of cash, and dirty lawyers to insure their products reign supreme, both on the shelf and bundled with new computers. They noose is beginning to tighten. They see a serious threat that refuses to go away.
My email page looks like this:
..........
Unfortunately due to "spam" I can't put my email address on the web without "email havesting programs" finding my email address and sending me unsolicited email. However you can probably work out what my email address is...
If you can guess what my email address is, feel free to email me. Most computer programs won't be clever enough to work it out, however I hope you are.
Honestly, HTML is a decent precedent for XML. Sure the structure is less ordered, and not so clearly delineated between logical/structral and layout/presentation halves. But the idea of using containing tags to structure text has been around since at least SGML in 1986.
Let's hope that this patent applies to a specific implementation of XML, such as the form:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><XML>
</XML>
Heh.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Erm, wrong topic mate. I think you were after this one: Is E-Mail Obscuration Worth It?
call me a cynic, but considering that 90% of people use an OS that was copied from Apple, (Xerox) and that has since been granted numerous ridiculous patents on stuff they stole, I find it hard to believe that we will see a public outcry over this. the only peole yelling will be the one's yelling about M$'s monopoly, and no one had paid any attention to them yet, and that is unlikely to change in the future.
From what I read from the NZ Patent law, which has been taken from UK Patent Law the applicant needs to formally provide evidence that they are the first inventor, so I am not sure what chance does M$ have to make this claim
My 2c
[snip URL:http://www.piperpat.co.nz/patlaw/patact.html]
Persons entitled to make application -
(1) An application for a patent for an invention may be made by any of the following persons, that is to say:
(a) By any person claiming to be the true and first inventor of the invention:
(b) By any person being the assignee of the person claiming to be the true and first inventor in respect of the right to make such an application, - and may be made by that person either alone or jointly with any other person.
(2) Without prejudice to the foregoing provisions of this section, an application for a patent for an invention in respect of which protection has been applied for in a convention country may be made by the person by whom the application for protection was made or by the assignee of that person; and for the purposes of this Act the filing in any convention country of a complete specification after the filing of a provisional specification or provisional specifications in respect of any such application shall be deemed to be an application for protection in that country:
Provided that no application shall be made by virtue of this subsection after the expiration of 12 months from the date of the application for protection in a convention country or, where more than one such application for protection has been made, from the date of the first application.
[(2A) For the purposes of this section, where more than one application for protection in a convention country has been made, the first application may be disregarded and the second application shall be substituted for the first application where -
(a) The first application was made in or in respect of the same convention country and by the same applicant as the second application; and
(b) Not later than the date of filing of the second application, the first application was unconditionally withdrawn, abandoned or refused; and
(i) The first application had not been made available to the public in New Zealand or elsewhere before its unconditional withdrawal, abandonment or refusal; and
(ii) No rights remain outstanding in respect of the first application; and
(iii) The first application has not served to establish a priority date (as defined in section 2 of this Act) in relation to another application in any country.]
(3) An application for a patent may be made under subsection (1) or subsection (2) of this section by the personal representative or the assignee of the personal representative of any deceased person who, immediately before his death was entitled to make such an application.
(4) An application for a patent made by virtue of subsection (2) of this section is in this Act referred to as a convention application.
Cf. Patents Act 1949, s.1 (UK); 1921-22, # 18, ss.3, 48
As to the meaning of the term "personal representative" in subs.(3), see s.2(2).
[S.7(2A) was inserted by The Patents Amendment Act 1992]
[/snip]
Isn't the point of XML that its a fucking document markup language? If this patent made any god damn sense, whats to stop people from patenting marking up ANYTHING in xml? Patents are supposed to be nonobvious, and marking up documents in XML is PRETTY DAMN OBVIOUS.
Wasnt Microsoft recently on the recieving end of a rediculous patent decision. Something about someone having a patent on embedded objects in hypertext documents. I believe they have recieved quite a lot of support against this from their usual competitors (adobe, macromedia, ibm etc), those who cry foul when microsoft does something just like this.
I suppose the business world is very forgetting. Or perhaps Microsoft dont intend to exercise the patent, and just want to make sure no one else gets it.
and on a side - whats the use of it only being patented in New Zealand?
Toby
The USA is a great example for many, many things. Copy our constitution, copy our legal system, and even copy our original copyright law if needbe. But for the love of inventing, do not copy our patent system or our modern copyright law!
We even let the swingset be patented for goodness' sake!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
If you want commercial, yet high quality examples, look at some of the tools from ArborText, Softquad, or even Altova. If you want something from the GNU project, then look at the PSGML mode for Emacs, which I recall using already in 1995. I'm sure I'm missing many examples from the 70's and 80's.
To take other recent examples, the versions of HTML prior to XHTML are in SGML. SGML and XML are the rules for defining sets of rules (aka DTDs) like HTML. You have many choices:
- HTML 2.0 (sgml)
- HTML 3.2 (sgml)
- HTML 4.01 (sgml)
- XHTML 1.0 (XML)
- Docbook 4.x (sgml + xml)
- TEI (sgml)
- TEI-lite (sgml + xml)
... and so on
I expect that some TeX users could speak up as well.Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
While Microsoft can patent this, there is no way they could possible enforce it.. Furthermore, New Zealand's population isn't very big, so will affect the open source world minimally. At the very worst Sun could just put a clause on the website, and if they get sued, they could practically just argue that MS never invented XML anyway. I think the true intention of it is to really stop the open source packages creating a unified format that they all follow, which is easily done in XML, which would be a major breakthrough for open source (compatibility to the max), and as u all know, if all the linux documents are all cross portable, and they can all maintain editor specific features, then, if a good first impression is made (with good reviews etc), it could easily win businesses over, especially because the idea could potentially all spreadsheets, word documents etc to all work very interchangably with a common format
When they published the specs of Word documents I marveled and thought that maybe they were beginning to understand what this open IT era is all about.
Instead, now they are going from embrace and extend to embrace and close up.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Does the Kiwi law allow for private prosecution aginst the New Zealand government? What would happen if a private prosecution aginst the patent office was clearly going to happen if they allow this patent to proceed seeing that it clearly isn't a new idea. I expect they will look at the issue much differently if they have to figure out where their budget is going to go. The Kiwi govt is small enough that they could not afford a law suit brought on by people from other countries and I'm guessing they would clearly change their tune. Of course they should punish Microsoft for outright lies in patent applications.
fresh pond? you must be..... australian
... and Microsoft is patenting the idea of rolling it... sigh! What is this with comp sci? Whatever naive, obvious and trivial mental association made in this field is considered insightful discovery! I'm a cheap ass sysadmin and everyone I know (except the real compsci dudes) venerates me for my quality expertise! WTF? Side note... this news can't be true; and if it were, it would violate the very principle of the Antitrust Lawsuit. How can something (XML) designed to enfranchise the IT world from proprietary undocumented formats be limited in it's applicability so that it can't be used for the very specific application it was developed for?
Sigh...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
This is only a patent application, not (yet) a granted patent (in fact in the EU the patent application has only just been published, on 2 Jan this year).
From the 'priority number' (US20020187060 20020628) it looks as though the original application was for a US patent, filed some time in 2002. So that is the cut-off date for prior art.
The full paperwork file for the EPO patent application can also be viewed, at EPOline.
I am assuming that someone somewhere already holds a patent for the XML markup language.
The whole point of XML as i see it is to enable information interchange easily on a wide range of software platforms, packages and over the internet. Correctly formed XML not only contains data but it should also contain markup that describes how the data is stored, allowing anyone to read/write to the XML document.
Im guessing that the person who filed the original patent for XML would have made statements towards this effect. Would this not create a conflict between the two patents?
In any case the audacity of Microsoft never ceases to amaze me and this outrageous current application shows that we really need more techies in the right places. They cannot be allowed to continue to abuse the system in this way, taking advantage of people who know no better.
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Does that include real XML formats like OpenOffice/StarOffice or the M$ XML format that Word uses?
dumbass
Word 2000 can "round-trip"* well-formed XML - they claim it's HTML, but it's actually something HTMLish in XML (basically XHTML with the wrong namespace), plus Office and Word extensions in their own namespaces for the word-processor-ish stuff. As far as I remember, Word 2000 HTML supports a pretty large subset of the features Word 2000 .doc files do.
(*: i.e. not just export like Word 97 did)
MS knows that OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are using XML for storing word, spreadsheet, presentation documents. I believe that the purpose of this patent is only for the marketing. Now MS can say they own a patent on XML Word Document, just like it was an innovation from MS. Therefore, it will be difficult to create an application which is able to read these documents (the format is protected) without paying some fee.
Remember that XML is a cut-down version of SGML, and SGML has been around for several years. That having been said, Microsoft is claiming a patent on something that has already been in use for quite some time, and in the manner that they specify. Framemaker uses its own markup language (MML), but its structure and purpose parallel that of SGML and XML.