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Company Claims Patent Over XML
Aviran Mordo writes "News.com reports that a small software developer plans to seek royalties from companies that use XML, the latest example of patent claims embroiling the tech industry. Charlotte, N.C-based Scientigo owns two patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426) covering the transfer of 'data in neutral forms.' These patents, one of which was applied for in 1997, are infringed upon by the data-formatting standard XML, Scientigo executives assert."
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define+edifac t&btnG=Google+Search
Significantly older than 1997, and achieved the same goals as XML, though much less elegantly.
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Somebody should patent the patent process. Quite possibly the only way to screw it up more.
if only i could patent the first post, but another anonymous coward would probably claim prior art.
According to this:
/ webmaster-2002/materials/savory/slides/img18.html
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops
the XML draft specification was prepared in November 1996. Good luck with that January 28, 1997 filing date.
As the article points out, XML is an outgrowth of SGML, which goes way before these filings. Yet somehow both patents manage to recognize neither SGML nor XML as prior art. Patent trolls indeed, I'm looking forward to the crunching sound their company makes when it is crushed. XML is too entrenched for the big players to ignore these losers.
Sig under construction since 1998.
From http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.paoli.html:
"Microsoft cofounded the XML working group at the W3C in July 96 and actively participated in the definition of the standard."
This was used in IE4.00 for their Channel Definition File (used to schedule "Pull" of channels, an idea that's largely died). I was implementing CDF files at Scala in '96/97. The patent was filed in '97.
Do these companies just forget they have a patent on some technology/feature and then 8 years later when their patent is included in a standard and a huge part of the community they say "Hey, didn't we patent that 8 years ago?"
There really needs to be some reform that states a company has 90 days, 1 year, or some short fixed period of time to bring a suit against a product, starting from the time it hits the market and is available to the public, the industry, or something.
The idea that you can silently sit on patents waiting for the world to embrace an obvious idea is an abuse of the system.
From the patent abstract:
The present invention simplifies the data modeling process and enables its full dynamic versioning by employing a non-hierarchical non-integrated structure to the organization of information.
XML is hierarchical data structure. Hence, his claim isn't valid.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
This fact:
Charlotte, N.C.-based Scientigo owns two patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426) covering the transfer of "data in neutral forms." These patents, one of which was applied for in 1997, are infringed upon by the data-formatting standard XML, Scientigo executives assert.
combined with this fact:
Daly noted that companies or even individuals often make patent claims on XML. For example, Microsoft, which uses XML as the foundation of many of its products, was awarded a patent for programming techniques related to XML.
shows me that the USPTO hopelessly is fucked up.
These people are either overwhelmed by the number of claims and have no time to do the proper research before granting a patent, or they are are just plain stupid. I'm going to be generous and assume that these examiners are given a quota that they have to have resolved each week and that they haven't the time or resources to validate every claim. There is probably also a lack of expertise in the USPTO to properly vet the claims made in these applications.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
These insane patents are actually the best thing that could have ever happened. The way things are going now, there is going to have to be a major overhaul of the patent system. The instane patents have made it dramaticly clear that there is something wrong with the system (these are the tech equivelents of suing McDonalds because your kids are fat).
Had companies been less aggressive in patenting and litigating nearly anything possible, the system might go on how it is now for decades. These people are making the patent system collapse in a way that those against software patents don't have the power to do.
On slashdot, only the anonymous coward reads the article. Us, cowboys, will head straight to the arena for a quick round of trolling and fighting.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
Close. XML is not 'intended for rendering non-document structured data'.
XML allows you to create structured data, be they documents, data interchange, paramet lists, or recipes. XML made some of the schema definitions less ambiguous and more rigid -- SGML had all sorts of things that made parsing difficult. XML didn't say that you can't use XML to store documents and must use it for data. They just said "we'll simplify the rules so that things like yacc can parse the grammar". That's all.
XML is completely purpose agnostic. So, actually, was SGML. SGML was primarily used to make structured data, but there was never an expectation that the SGML files were "document" vs "data". Though the original uses of GML/SGML may have been for marking up documents, that wasn't required.
I was using SGML for structured data interchange about 10 or 11 years ago. In the same way, I'm free to use XML for either data, documents, or anything else. The DocBook DTD was around in the SGML days, and is still in use now -- it defines documents.
Not really. The stuff in a document is data to the program that runs it. It is a perfectly valid (and well established) usage of SGML to contain what you're calling data -- config filed, parameters, etc. SGML was being used for data back in the day. Much like XML can be used to represent a 'document', or to hold 'data' -- XML-RPC or the ArborText editors are both uses of XML as an interchange format.
An instance of an XML file (ie. an XML document) is either data, document, or whatever it is intended to be.
It is completely false ot say that XML and SGML are differentiated by what the purpose of the contents of the file is. And it is completely valid to say the long history of GML/SGML/XML are so much before these patents it's not funny.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
How about structurally-tagged content dating back as far as the late 1960s?
A Brief History of the Development of SGML
For that matter, XML is just a specific, more restrictive dialect of SGML. The SGML draft standard was first published in 1985, twelve years prior to this patent. Since XML is a proper subset of prior art that existed prior to the filing of this patent, XML in effect existed prior to the filing of this patent.
If this ever goes to court, the company should expect their lawyers to be prosecuted for barratry.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Quotes from that web site:
"This signature quote intentionally left blank"
Since I'm sure I'm not the only person who had to look this up. :)
barratry (br'-tr)
n., pl. -tries.
1. The offense of persistently instigating lawsuits, typically groundless ones.
2. An unlawful breach of duty on the part of a ship's master or crew resulting in injury to the ship's owner.
3. Sale or purchase of positions in church or state.
[Middle English barratrie, the sale of church offices, from Old French baraterie, deception, malversation, from barater, to cheat. See barrator.]
We're always hearing of lawyers who file groundless suits. How often are they prosecuted for barratry? Seems like the barratry officer would be the most popular guy around, except among the lawyers.
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make install -not war