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Microsoft Patenting Office XML Formats

Posted by michael on from the uh-oh dept.

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."

26 of 455 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft - what a trip by ChaoticChaos · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How to make a non-proprietary format (XML) proprietary. Gee, wouldn't it just be simpler to cut XML out of Office entirely than to throw legions of lawyers and patents at it?

    I can see the headlines now - "RIAA and Microsoft make double bust - RIAA found illegal MP3s and Microsoft found someone using XML output from Office".

    Microsoft - "How far do you want your head up your backside today?"

  2. They can patent file formats now? by corebreech · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Did I miss a memo, or is this a truly sinister precedent? It suggests that every kind of application will now be able to patent the way it saves data, thereby denying others the opportunity to import data from that file.

    It also destroys what was the entire rationale for XML, doesn't it? What's the point of a convenient medium through which information may be exchanged if everybody starts patenting their DTD's?

    Brace yourself for the next version of DOM/SAX/XPath that not only checks to see if the document is well-formed and/or valid, but that also constrains your access to that document based on some new kind of hybrid between DRM and XML Schema.
    UnauthorizedAccessException: You do not have the credentials necessary to access attribute 'bar' of element 'foo'. Your IP address has been logged.

    It's shit like this that makes me want to get out of computers and get into chemistry.
    --
    Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
    1. Re:They can patent file formats now? by lfourrier · · Score: 5, Informative

      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)

    2. Re:They can patent file formats now? by Vellmont · · Score: 5, Informative

      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
    3. Re:They can patent file formats now? by 1u3hr · · Score: 5, Informative
      Remember it's being dealt with by the same office that granted patents on one-click shopping, emails of the form user@domain.name tied to http://user.domain.name ... etc.

      RTFA: It's not the US patent office but Europe and NZ.

    4. Re:They can patent file formats now? by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 5, Insightful
      "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. [Sam Hiser of OpenOffice.org]"
      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.

      1) In the real world, you can file for a patent on literally anything, and it will often be granted no matter how ludicrous. With patents on one-click shopping, patents on putting a small trackball on top of a mouse, and patents on swinging sideways on a swing (I kid you not), Microsoft will have no problem winning a patent on XML data from Office.

      2) Once they have been granted the patent, good luck fighting it in court. No matter how silly the patent actually is, and no matter how much prior examples there are of applications sharing data with XML, I think you'll have a hard time fighting off Microsoft unless you have exceedingly deep pockets.

      This is wrong on so many levels... They are effectively forbidding you to manipulate your own data! Office documents are not like the Office application. Hell, they are not even like 'rented' data which you have licenced (as the MPAA would claim is the case with DVDs). Microsoft owns Office, but I own the documents I produce, and I reserve the right to do whatever I want with the data in them!

      It has always been difficult to read such data into applications other than the one used for authoring. This has so far always been a technical issue (and one associated with many products, not just Microsoft's). Now, Microsoft will effectively make it illegal to use non-Microsoft tools to interpret the data. For me, this is another important point to take to management, if and when they will consider alternative products.
      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    5. Re:They can patent file formats now? by CowboyBob500 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      OK, I only run a small business, but I do exactly that. I refuse to accept or send out Word documents. I haven't lost any business yet. I send out PDFs (or RTFs if requested), and demand the same in return. And if push comes to shove, everyone can read a plain text document.

      If only more people had the balls to stand up to the so-called "office standards"...

      Bob

      --
      Listen to my latest album here
    6. Re:They can patent file formats now? by shepd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      >Have a boilerplate response ready explaining that you only accept documents in open formats

      That isn't going to work nearly as well as:

      "Our office is standardized on Office 97, and with 200 seats, the cost to 'upgrade' to Office 2003 is beyond our capacity. Please resend the file in a backwards compatible manner."

      That will get their computing department to ensure people save their files in a compatible format, as most businesses *are* going to stick to Office 2000 or Office 97. They've probably had that message sent to them dozens of times before you give it to them, so they're going to listen to it.

      A one-off "it's not open source" message wouldn't get my suppliers, for example, to stop sending me their pricesheets in Excel files.

      This is the same as using corel draw for your graphics. It might not be the graphics industry standard, but all the companies I've dealt with (From the National and Regional Phone Books to Local Newspapers, all the way down to the local Ad-Rag) will explain, in detail, how you can save corel draw files in a manner they will accept. They specifically mention corel draw because it *is* popular enough that not supporting it means lost business (despite popular belief by stupid hoity-toity graphics folks at the local learning centers). However, I'd not expect a document on how to save a compatible Xfig file...

      --
      If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
  3. Closed for openess open for business by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    they make it xml so its open and easy to work with for developers... now they want to try and make it only the developers that pay them $$ ?

    1. Re:Closed for openess open for business by gregorio · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  4. Europe fight this thing united! by jodebaer · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. We planned to make use of the XML from Word... by Psiren · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... and we still will, regardless of these patents (which I haven't even bothered to read about). It's my fucking data, and I'll do what the fuck I like with it thank you very much.

  6. Forgot about embrace and extend by Tyrell+Hawthorne · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Microsoft has always played an interesting game when it comes to standards," he said. "They're going to support them as necessary to get technology broadly adopted. But at the same time, they're an (intellectual property) company. That's the case with any big business."

    I would have agreed, if after broadly adopted he would have said "they stop playing according to the standard and thereby break compatibility with other software". If you're an analyst on Microsoft, you should know what embrace and extend is, and I think he should have mentioned it here. That is, unless he's partial to Microsoft, which the company claims it isn't.

  7. Now all we need... by graveyardduckx · · Score: 5, Funny

    is for SCO to claim they own all of the code to the unix interoperability services/functions/whatever for Windows. Then Microsoft goes after SCO for using XML somewhere else. Then they can go after each other in court. Let them destroy each other! Yay! Off-topic or is it? It's 5:20am and I'm still awake, ignore this post, I'm an idiot.

  8. Cross platform? by kellererik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Based on this article even the latest M$Office on the Mac can't read all files from its WinDOS sibling.
    Bottom line is, if you want to avoid a lock-in a.k.a. pay to view your own documents if you decide to stop using M$ Software, don't start using the 'new' M$Office in the first place.

    my 2 cents

  9. absolutely no surprise at all. by flacco · · Score: 5, Interesting
    MS even *said* that their goal was to use XML to make data handling easier *within* the microsoft family of technologies. they never said they would open it up to the rest of the world.


    not that anyone for a moment should have suspected these douchebags would.


    they're just speeding up the inevitable, making even more clear why software patents suck ass, and why it's urgent for everyone to reject proprietary technologies NOW. RIGHT NOW. the sooner you do it, the sooner the pain will be over, and the sooner you can start reaping the rewards.

    --
    pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
  10. Reminds me of SCO... by 5.11Climber · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think that Microsoft is now in the early stages of SCOitis. Our products suck but we have some questionable IP and we're going to make that our major source of revenue.

    --
    Arf!
  11. Monopoly abuse by kmonsen · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If this is not monopoly abuse I don't know what is. Remeber office is a major reason for people to buy windows and a major part of MS income.

    The bottom line is MS technology should not be used in any way, and we should not belive a bought department of justice will do something about it.

    This may sound paranoid but is unfortunatly true. Once you are stuck with MS products they may change the license for new versions as they see fit. If it were not for Linux, Windows would be really expensive today.

  12. Do like GIMP did... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ages ago (back when this was a Windows box) I downloaded a little thing for GIMP that let me make GIFs. This was legal because I live in Europe with no software patents as of yet (fingers crossed/touch wood).
    OOo could offer something similar if the patented XML format became as popular as the .doc is: 'you may only use this module if software patents do not apply in your country.' Of course there'd be no way to stop Americans downloading it, which would be just terrible!

  13. Re:Yet Again by miu · · Score: 5, Informative
    Got another example of an open technology Microsoft has made proprietry?

    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.]
  14. WinFS, Oh you mean Cario's Object File System by NZheretic · · Score: 5, Informative
    1994 Cairo Takes OLE to New Levels
    The next version of Windows NT, code-named Cairo and targeted for release sometime in 1995, will be built around the concepts of objects and component software. It will have a native OFS (Object File System) and distributed system support.
    1995 Signs to Cairo
    Cairo, Microsoft's object-oriented successor to Windows NT, will begin beta testing in early 1996 for release in 1997. Although Microsoft is not revealing the full details of Cairo yet, there are enough clues within current Microsoft OSes to yield a good idea of how it might work.
    1996 Unearthing Cairo
    At the first NT developers conference in 1992, Bill Gates announced that Cairo would arrive in three years and would incorporate object-oriented technologies, especially an object file system. Since then, we've seen Windows NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 3.51, and most recently NT 4.0. None is object oriented, none has an object file system, none is Cairo. It seems that Cairo is Microsoft's sly way of promising the world. "Will we see Plug and Play in NT?" "Oh yes, of course, in Cairo." "Will NT ever produce world peace and cheap antigravity?" "You bet -- in Cairo."
    The so call Longhorn WinFS directory is just another rencarnation of the Cairo object orientated file system.

    September 1, 2003 Eweek 'Longhorn' Rollout Slips

    Microsoft Corp. has once again shifted the schedule for the release of "Longhorn," the company's next major version of Windows, leaving some users up in the air about an upgrade path.

    Microsoft executives from Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on down have long described Longhorn as the Redmond, Wash., company's most revolutionary operating system to date. The product was originally expected to ship next year. Then in May of this year, officials pushed back the release date to 2005. But now executives are declining to say when they expect the software to ship.

    "We do not yet know the time frame for Longhorn, but it will involve a lot of innovative and exciting work," said Gates at a company financial analyst meeting this summer. Since then, other Microsoft officials have neither retracted nor clarified Gates' statement.

  15. Re:Yet Again by miu · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yeah, if only Microsoft didn't hold a gun to the heads of the companies using their software and it was all just a level playing field.

    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.]
  16. Australia by zbaron · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  17. Re:Ha! by blowdart · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

  18. Re:Ha! by w128jad · · Score: 5, Informative
    I use C# and the CLI , theyre ECMA specified. I wont use MS's fantasy web shit either, use SOAP, its standard. But I will use C# and the CLI.
    Standard in this case doesn't mean free from IP protection such as patents. In fact, Microsoft chose the ECMA specifically because of the ECMA's policy on patent.
    They will accept any standard, including patented IP.

    Here's the General Declaration:
    The General Assembly of Ecma shall not approve recommendations of Standards which are covered by patents when such patents will not be licensed by their owners on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis.
    You may be subject to any license that Microsoft wishes, and licensing fees for use of the CLI, .net, etc.
    --
    w2^7me out.
  19. Re:This may prove counter-productive for MS by jonasj · · Score: 5, Interesting
    You don't wanna use CHM, it's a proprietary MS format with some limitations compared to regular HTML.

    You can, however, MIME-encapsulate your document to contain the HTML and the resources in the same file, very similar to how email attachments work. That is described in RFC 2557. This is the format that Internet Explorer uses when you do Save As|Web Archive (Single File).

    A perhaps even cooler way would be to use data: URLs as described in RFC 2397 to include the resources inline where they are references. This is not supported by Internet Explorer however, so the general public won't be able to see your documents.

    data: URLs are extremely cool. If you use Mozilla, check out this example:

    data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODdhMAAwAPAAAAAAAP///y wA AAAAMAAwAAAC8IyPqcvt3wCcDkiLc7C0qwyGHhSWpjQu5yqmCY sapyuvUUlvONmOZtfzgFzByTB10QgxOR0TqBQejhRNzOfkVJ+5 YiUqrXF5Y5lKh/DeuNcP5yLWGsEbtLiOSpa/TPg7JpJHxyendz WTBfX0cxOnKPjgBzi4diinWGdkF8kjdfnycQZXZeYGejmJlZeG l9i2icVqaNVailT6F5iJ90m6mvuTS4OK05M0vDk0Q4XUtwvKOz rcd3iq9uisF81M1OIcR7lEewwcLp7tuNNkM3uNna3F2JQFo97V riy/Xl4/f1cf5VWzXyym7PHhhx4dbgYKAAA7

    (remove the spaces that slashdot adds and paste it in your address bar).
    --
    You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.