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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
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.]
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?