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Microsoft Patenting Office XML Formats
mmurphy000 writes "News(.com)+ reports that Microsoft has filed for patents in multiple jurisdictions to control the way other applications use Office's new XML-based file formats. Musings from pundits suggest that OpenOffice.org and other applications might be blocked from interoperating with Office. This, of course on the heels of today's article on Bruce Perens' concerns over patents."
Didn't we have this article before ?
ok, so it was last week, but still, jeez.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
This is exactly the kind of thing the EU Parliament wants the prohibit, via it's amendments to the doming patent EU unification law. The Parliament has clearly excluded the use of patents that hinder software interoperability. Those of you that want to help us in the battle to sustain those amendments (there is a _lot_ of resistance from the big guys) please join at swpat.ffii.org or softwarepatenten.be in Belgium. Patents are indeed more dangerous than SCO.
1) from the article:
Sam Hiser, who handles marketing for OpenOffice.org, doubted the application would go far given the wide array of precedents for applications sharing XML data.
"I think it's going to be a non-issue, legally. I just don't think the patent will be accepted," he said. "This is Microsoft doing its aggressive best to protect its interests."
2) from reading the application:
I don't even understand what is the claimed invention (perhaps I'm just stupid in the morning), what is novel, original and non obvious.
And they keep repeating time and time again that all is in 1 file. So just use 2 and you are safe... (IANAPL, of course)
Easy to say, could be hard to do. If MS gets their
way and the business world is forced to upgrade to Office 2003, you may not have much choice in the matter when you get sent a word document in XML format.
At the moment I don't think there's much chance of that as Office reached the "good enough" point at Office 97. The point of course is that often you don't have a choice in what software you're forced to run.
AccountKiller
Those extra, proprietary, and incompatible Kerberos fields in W2k+ for one. I think they put those in just to make my life difficult. Of course, it wouldn't have mattered if they'd simply made their proprietary extensions open without having to sign some bizarre NDA...
GPL: Free as in will
RTFA: It's not the US patent office but Europe and NZ.
You cannot generally make an open standard proprietary, what MS is good at is "damage and dillition" of an open standard. The enhancements, bugs, and misfeatures contained in MS implementations of open technolgies tend to become de facto extensions to the standard.
Examples:
- PPP
- HTML
- mpeg4
- SMB
- SIP
- Kerberos
- DNS
- ecmascript
They have varying degrees of success with this tactic, and to be fair most vendors do the same thing - but because of the market pentration that MS enjoys they are more successful at it than most. Proprietary lock in and vendor bashing is bad enough, once patents are added to the mess MS becomes truly evil in this area.[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
September 1, 2003 Eweek 'Longhorn' Rollout Slips
That is why I state that there are different was in which MS extends open standards.
enhancements. If MS offers an easier way to pop open a window in ecmascript and documents it at msdn then lots of people will use it. No one is forcing those developers to use the MS extension, but users of the products of those developers and the developers of implementations that need to interoperate are dragged along for the ride.
bugs. If protocol x has a configuration negotiation sub-protocol and the MS implementation has a bug in its state transitions then all vendors must support work arounds for the MS implementation to avoid being seen as broken themselves.
misfeatures. MS often adds features that are not properly thought out and change the operation of a protocol in such a way as to create some pretty hairy corner cases. Vendors who do not want to be viewed as broken must deal with these cases - even if they do not support the extension themselves.
It is not simply a case of being better than MS, compatibility requirements with MS sneak into all sorts of things - sometimes as a technical requirement, sometimes as a business decision, and sometimes as the payoff to a bit of MS quid pro quo. Often the sheer size of MS removes the choice on whether or not to be compatible with them, especially in consumer software but more and more in enterprise software.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13792i ng to this article a patent has been filed in Canada and the U.S. also.
Accord
After a bit of searching, i've found activity at IP Australia. The application titled "System and method for supporting non-native XML in native XML of a word-processor document" sounds scary!
Mr. Hiser seems to have a rather poor grasp of the US legal and patent system. No doubt he knows how it is supposed to work.
Microsoft did not file this patent under US juristiction, only in New Zealand and the European Union.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolistic corporation
hold it right there, bucko. microsoft was not charged under the criminal provisions of the sherman act, and therefore, the company has not been "convicted" of anything. yes, microsoft was found civilly liable for violating sec. 1 of the act by using anti-competitive measures to maintain its monopoly on the desktop os market, but no, microsoft was not "convicted" in the legal--and only appropriate--sense of the word.
This was all moot for the most part until 1998, with the State St. Bank v. Signature Financial Group ruling, which made it possible to patent automated business methods. Now we have all sorts of looniness.
I'm sure Sun and the W3C would be interested in that claim
This version:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-soap12-20010709/
Latest version:
http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12/
Editors:
Martin Gudgin (DevelopMentor)
Marc Hadley (Sun Microsystems)
Jean-Jacques Moreau (Canon)
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen (Microsoft Corp.)
Free ?
You will need to pay the MSDN License.
The European Patent Office has granted something like 30,000 software patents over the last 20 years.
But that has been done, without legislative approval, by the EPO re-interpreting the rules to mean diametrically opposite to what was originally intended.
It's applications like this one from Microsoft which make the current legislative battle in the European system, which will finally write the official law on this, so vitally important to win.
1) In the real world, you can file for a patent on literally anything, and it will often be granted no matter how ludicrous.
I think I can prove your point.
Note that binary data embedded in the XML was explicitly REJECTED by OpenOffice.org.
I don't know when the discussion first surfaced, but I'm pretty sure encoding binary data within the XML file in base64 and similar formats was being discussed on the Open Office mailing list well in advance of Microsoft adding it to their file formats. If that is the case, then the only problem would be if Microsoft have used an encoding that could be protected.
This is not accurate, although someone might have patented process for making laser diodes that slowed things down (I don't know that one way or another). Check out this link for a history of laser diodes. They were invented 40 years ago. Presumably the patent expired in 1982 or so. I don't remember a flood of consumer laser diodes in the early 80's.
For that matter Holonyak's laser was the first GaAsP diode light emmitting diode---a category that includes every red LED that you saw on alarm clocks, early digital watches and calculators in the 70's. If the patent on his laser had been enforced aggressively I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have seen red LEDs in cheap consumer items.
Here is teh small but crucial difference:
OOo puts all data in a few different XML files and teh zips them up. The W0rd XML stores everything in _one_ single XML file. There you go. I gues its called patenting an implementation process or something.
They will accept any standard, including patented IP.
Here's the General Declaration: You may be subject to any license that Microsoft wishes, and licensing fees for use of the CLI,
w2^7me out.
>So, has anyone heard of a word processor that has an XML file format that contains all its binary data? If so, post links under this thread :).
Seems like AbiWord is one word processor (and there's probably others too) that uses an XML based file format, with all the binary data in one file.
http://www.abisource.com/
Free ? You will need to pay the MSDN License.
No you won't. MSDN is just a developer network with documents, tutorials, articles and support.
If you know how to work with the formats, you don't need MSDN, even for this kind of "MSDN permission" you're talking about.
When you subscribe MSDN you don't receive any special MS authorization.
You're situation seems completely reverse of mine. While I've also found that Office 97 and 2000 is "good enough", I've also found that OpenOffice.org is also "good enough". I've helped my friend with his thesis. He claimed that whenever he reached page 298, Word would just crash. I opened it in OpenOffice.org, scrolled to page 298, and braced for a crash. All I saw were a couple of strange boxes that show up for unknown characters. I removed those and saved in .doc. He opened it in Word, scrolled through it, and found nothing has changed, except for the crashing part.
.sxw, etc. that I create. It would save some people the pain of having to download the entire OOo suite.
Most of my work, as well, is done in OpenOffice.org. And while I don't do the hundred-plus page documents you do, I've not run into any problems with it. Me being financial officer, and systems administrator, my document and spreadsheet creation are pretty varied. I say, if it works for me, it must be "good enough". And if it can save a 300+ page thesis, my friend probably also thinks its "good enough". But then that is quite subjective. I say, if you've got the bandwidth, download and try it out.
Oh, the only thing I wish for is an OOo reader that can read those
I read the fucking article. It *is* the format that Microsoft seeks the patent on... if you can control the way somebody accesses a file, you effectively control the format.
The simple example is patenting the text file. You would say that no, they aren't actually patenting the format, but that's essentially meaningless if they patent the technique of reading the file sequentially from beginning to end one byte at a time.
I never said they were trying to patent XML. What I did say was that they were trying to patent the data expressed by XML (or at least that was my intent.) To me, an application of XML is just as much a file format as is, say, saving the data in flat binary, or as text, etc.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
There's not any need to even CDATA it.
7 6299391772466581821756165226 4762 731636
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8">
<word-document>
<snookies pif="akf3654FHQewr">
<proing>A34Fg3HHF</proing>
125876192882775492958
<boozum/>
94623825431092375095436832187610351371
</snookies>
</word-document>
is equally unusable by outside applications. XML doesn't specify semantics. Of course, the more features of the document that are propagated up to the XML level, the less there is to reverse engineer, but if they're going to patent the semantics, then they don't care if people reverse engineer it - that's simply a chance for their lawyer department to become a cash cow again.
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
(This is where someone calls me a Bozo and tells me it already exists...)
Hi, Bozo!
Microsoft's HTML help files already do this. And StarOffice/OpenOffice document formats have a similar implementation, but with XML.
Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't a patent on only cover the method used to create the XML file? If so then there would be nothing stopping Open Source projects to support reading M$'s "open" XML format. Just need to refrain from adding support to write data to that format.
The file format is called 'Compiled HTML' or CHM. A technical look at reverse engineering it is here:
t .h tml
http://www.speakeasy.org/~russotto/chm/chmforma
While you're correct that you won't get any special licenses to use MS formats through MSDN, and that most of the documentation is available through the MSDN website, an MSDN subscription includes licenses to basically every piece of software Microsoft is currently supporting.
But, yeah, MSDN won't give you the license to use Microsoft patented whatever on other operating systems. It will probably give you the information on how to access the various Microsoft APIs to handle the info, but that's it.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
....or SXC for spreadsheets ;)
The OpenOffice.org file formats are close to being what you describe - they are XML with CSS and other properties defined, and then zipped into, SXW or SXC files. You can open an SX* file using any application that supports unzipping, and extract the individual components as you like.
Perhaps OpenOffice.org could challenge the validity of MS's patent on the basis of prior art using XML in THEIR document formats!
Visceral Psyche Films