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Judgement Against Microsoft Declares XML Editing Software To Be Worth $98?
Many people have written to tell us about the patent infringement lawsuit that resulted in a $200 million judgement against Microsoft by a small Toronto firm called i4i. Techdirt has a line on the details of the suit where the patent in question is for "separating the manipulation of content from the architecture of the document." i4i argues that this covers basic XML editing to the tune of $98 per application. "It's quite troubling that doing something as simple as adding an XML editor should infringe on a patent, but what's even more troubling is that the court somehow ruled that such an editor was worth $98 in the copies of Microsoft Word where it was used. An XML editor. $98. And people say patent awards aren't out of sync with reality?"
Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday a Texas federal jury ...
Texas? You mean the state of Marshall, TX where Microsoft (and everyone else who wants to win) holds all of its prosecuting patent cases? I do believe Microsoft may be getting a taste of its own medicine!
My work here is dung.
Aren't all the ODF documents just XML documents? How much does Open Office have to pay for each download?
Yeah, too bad it sets a precedence that fucks us all.
Down with "soft" patents!
Well--and I stress that I am not defending this ruling--you could look at it like raising the stakes involved since there are so many patent cases.
... maybe they are just on their way to try to get all these patent cases prevented?
Example: You steal a piece of fruit. You are convicted in front of a jury and slapped on the wrist. So you and everyone else does it again tomorrow. To combat this they increase the penalty to a $70 fine and 4 days in jail. In an ideal world, people stop stealing fruit.
Of course, I'm told hands get chopped off for stealing in some countries (could be wrong on that one though). I do know in Texas they're not opposed to electrocutin' ya for certain offenses though
Doesn't make a lick of sense at all considering you can't throw a goddamn progress bar on your application without risking litigation.
My work here is dung.
Granted in 1998.
It took them that long to sue MS?
Despite how one feels against M$, this is ridiculous.
It is not fair at all and could be used against other software with similar capabilities.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
http://www.google.com/patents?id=y8UkAAAAEBAJ&dq=5787449
I have no idea what this patent is saying.
Abstract:
A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformations. The system, for use by computer software developers, removes dependency on document encoding technology. A map of metacodes found in the document is produced and provided and stored separately from the document. The map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document. The system allows of multiple views of the same content, the ability to work solely on structure and solely on content, storage efficiency of multiple versions and efficiency of operation.
It sounds a bit like an embedded XSLT, more or less. Maybe?
Please reference one case where Microsoft was plaintiff in the Eastern District of Texas (where Marshall resides) and won some huge award... I'm not holding my breath.
P.S. --> A plaintiff is the party that brings a case, Microsoft was the defendant in this case. Under Federal rules of civil procedure, plaintiff has a choice of forum (assuming there is personal jurisdiction and venue, but MS conducts business in all 50 states, and venue is often pretty easy to manufacture as well).
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Anyone ever realize that maybe Texas should succeed?
I bet Texas already thinks they are successful. Did you mean secede? http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/secede
Are you aware of how much genius it takes to come up with the idea of first parsing the XML file into an internal in-memory format, editing that, then flattening that back to an XML file? Nobody would have done anything different than re-parsing and modifying the XML every time a minor change was made in the editor, if it weren't for this insightful patent.
I agree. I enjoy seeing them get a taste of their own medicine as much as anyone, but this sets an awful precedent. Can we organize a virtual million man march and get the patent system fixed? (and by "we" I mean someone other than me. I'm too busy drinking soda in my mom's basement.)
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I do believe Microsoft may be getting a taste of its own medicine!
You make it sound like it's a good thing...
I haven't read the patent, but TFA makes it sound like it applies to any kind of "WYSIWYG" editing of a document that gets saved in a structured format, not only XML ("separating the manipulation of content from the architecture of the document").
Besides the obvious implications for software like OpenOffice, this covers pretty much any type of WYSIWYG editing: spreadsheets, UML diagrams, math formulas, MS's Visio/Project outputs, the list goes on. Hell, all modern browsers support a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Do they infringe this patent?
This is absolutely terrible. The only good thing about it is that Microsoft has the money to overturn this joke of a patent, and can get enough media coverage to point out how broken the U.S. patent system is.
This is just ridiculous.
The patent would apply to any markup language. This is totally obvious and there are many implementations which have been around for more than 25 years.
There are several errors here.
1) the patent should not have been granted because to do something like this is obvious.
2) the court must be totally incompetent.
3) the defense must be incompetent as well.
Any database driven web page is an infringement. It doesn't need to be XML. In fact most databases have this and Oracle is an example. PostgreSQL also has tools which do this.
Any templating software does this.
This illustrates just how bad the USA patent system is.
I hope it goes to appeal and that this gets straightened out. The thing is we software developers are under attack these days We will find that the 3rd world will eventually do all our software development. I know I would not go into software development if I were back in my university days. If a person does anything of any significance they can expect to be sued. No other profession that I know of is attacked as we software developers are being attacked.
You make it sound like it's a good thing...
I haven't read the patent, but TFA makes it sound like it applies to any kind of "WYSIWYG" editing of a document that gets saved in a structured format, not only XML ("separating the manipulation of content from the architecture of the document").
Not just WYSIWYG. There are TeX and laTeX templates that aim to separate content from structure, and have been for a long time. There are even elements of it in roff. Just how old was that patent?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
You mean, the law should protect only the poor, miserable, and troubled, and punish the rich, mighty, and successful, so that everyone and everything becomes uniformly mediocre and apathetic. I'm amazed at how the pure open source ideals sometimes end up twisted in people's minds, so that they become indistinguishable from the dull communist propaganda. Surely, this is completely missing the point of the open source movement?
You don't become a patent troll by simply acquiring lots of obvious patents. You become a troll by using those patents to harass others. Lots of companies big and small file patents for DEFENSIVE reasons. Once you have a patent, it's much harder to sue you for infringement; after all, the patent office already agreed that you're doing something innovative. So as long as the patent office awards patents for obvious stuff, filing for such patents for defensive reasons is not only fair, but essentially required. You don't want to risk investing lots of money to develop and market a new product only to find out later that you've been sued by some stupid patent-squatter. Instead of blaming the big players, who only exercise their common sense right to protect their investment, the community should exert pressure on the patent office to start uniformly rejecting ALL such applications.
Two minor points.
#1 The patent application is from 1994. The example in the patent looks like the same early-XML format used by Ventura, a desktop publishing program released in 1986 by Xerox (and subsequently purchased by Corel). The general idea and much of the exact format was borrowed from expensive, proprietary computerized typesetting equipment that was popular in the 70's.
#2: The person who "examined" the patent, a Jankus; Almis R, is now a patent agent. I'm no longer amazed at how often bad patent applications are approved by law students, future patent attorneys and/or agents.
First they came for Microsoft...
But I was not Microsoft so I laughed at the irony.
You're joking, right? I develop an XML editor as my living, so I'm more than passingly familiar with this topic. Generating XML is on the order of a few hundred lines of code. A proper, full XML parser is on the order of 100,000 lines of code. The xerces source code is over 300,000 lines of code - there's a reason for that - does that sound "simple" to you? Even the simplest of XML parsers (and even if you only a tiny subset of XML) is orders of magnitude more complex and time-consuming than merely generating XML, which is trivial. Sure there's "very specific documentation" - so what? Have you even looked at that specification? The full specification is large. Having "very specific documentation" for something has nothing to do with difficulty of implementation (I'm sure there's "very specific documentation" for wiring a 747 too). And a parser has to handle so many more cases than a generator. And is much more work to test. For reasonably simple cases, you can write a generator that can generate a valid fairly complex XML document in under an hour. Good luck writing a proper XML parser in under an hour for an XML document of the same complexity.
Geez, you guys take patent infringement far too seriously.
There's a bit of a gap between 'holds all of their prosecuting cases' and 'here is a case where they were the defendant'.
Also, if what CajunArson writes is correct, it was the plaintiff that chose Marshall and not Microsoft.
Damned if you do, dam... oh wait, just 'damned if you are Microsoft, to hell with facts'.
Of the variety of parsing tasks out there to do, with the level of support available in terms of API's and frameworks, working with XML could be seen as slicing butter with a hot knife.
creimer wasn't talking about using a XML parsing API - of course it's easy if you use someone else's parsing and DOM API, that is not the point - he's talking about writing such a parser yourself. Look at the source code of an XML parser (like xerces) sometime if you think it's a quick 'n easy job to whip up something like that.
What do you mean by "all of its"? Do you know how many software patent cases Microsoft has been the plaintiff in before the TomTom case? Zero. (And BTW, Texas was convenient for TomTom, as that's where they have filed many of their suits against competing GPS companies).
Oh, and defendants have been winning more than plaintiffs in the Eastern District of Texas since early 2007.
Can we organize a virtual million man march and get the patent system fixed?
We could start a Facebook group!
Property is theft.
Since I am bored, I read it.
"I am a <b>sentence</b>."
The patent say, bad! Horrible! Instead, use content + "metacode map":
"I am a sentence."
+
chars 0-7 : normal
chars 7-15: bold
chars 15-16: normal
This is somehow supposed to be dramatically better in every way. Every frickin memory structure ever invented to edit any kind of structured text did this first and did it better.
I'm quite surprised that anyone would ever be found in violation of this "patent", because it's a pretty stupid thing to do.
"You make it sound like it's a good thing..."
Well, since you mention it, YES, it's a good thing!! What could possibly be better, than for a dozen winning suits against multi-billion dollar companies over frivolous patent suits? When the idiocy begins to hurt the idiot who are so successful at lobbying Washington and other capitals around the world, THEN we might see some sanity forced into patent law.
Really, I want another dozen such suits brought against Microsoft quickly. Each one of them worth a billion dollars or more. Redmond will be RACING to Washington, to BEG Congress to invalidate the portfolios of patent trolls. Of course, in the process, Microsoft's own trolls will be set adrift.....
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Indeed, but if enough of these cases are used to sting microsoft, that they decide to turn against software patents, then the fight against software patents gains a powerful ally.
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Ofcourse there is the risk that MS will simply buy this company so that they can use the patent themselves...
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