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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. $98. And people say patent awards aren't out of sync with reality?"
Aren't all the ODF documents just XML documents?
No, they're compressed XML documents.
How much does Open Office have to pay for each download?
If this ruling stands for them too, still nothing. They just won't let you download in the US. Free Software has no jurisdiction.
Despite how one feels against M$, 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
If it's an issue of editing XML documents in the sense of using XML to store structured data (such as Ooo documents), then the patent should be overturned. The whole point of XML is to provide a generic (and thereby obvious) means of structuring and editing data.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
When reading patents, you always ignore most of the boilerplate and preamble. Just go for the Claims section.
In this case, Claim 1 is quite understandable:
1. A computer system for the manipulation of the architecture and content of a document having a plurality of metacodes and content by producing a first map of metacodes and their addresses of use in association with mapped content; said system comprising:
metacode map distinct storage means;
means for providing a menu of metacodes to said metacode storage means;
and means for compiling said metacodes of the menu by locating, detecting and addressing the metacodes in the document to constitute the map and storing the map in the metacode storage means; and
means for resolving the content and the metacode map into the document.
Right. And any Open Office developers who happen to live in the U.S. - whose coding would be subject to U.S. patents - would do what exactly to avoid their liability for infringing the patent? And even if we pretend (as TFS seems to imply, incorrectly) that patent damages somehow have to be tied to a count of distributed copies, and that OO could cut off U.S. distribution, how would the cover the damages for copies already distributed in the U.S.?
If the patent applies to what OO is doing, it would be a big problem for the project.
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.
The USPTO should start denying patent applications that contain this kind of deliberately obfuscative gobbledegook. This is like describing cup of coffee as a "insulating ceramic material vessel for the transportation of central nervous system-stimulant-laden liquids of temperatures approaching gradual evaporation adapted to both manipulation and imbibation for the purposes of maximum early-hours alertness and/or circadian rhythm modulation." It's like reading Foucault.
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.
If you were to decide to consider allowing your eyes to accept light emitted from your screen after having navigated to a site where details of the case were located and then allowed your sensory equipment to interpret the light patterns in accordance to the conventions of the English language, you might find that i4i demonstrated its technology to Microsoft in 2001 with the hopes of licensing it for use in Microsoft Word. Microsoft declined, but with office 2003, they offered the same capabilities as that which i4i tried to license them. The case was filed in 2007, so it took them like 3-4 years to sue. There were also some emails they found that microsoft was discussing i4i and their patent prior to adding the office 2003 functionality.
So Basically the company was able to present evidence that Microsoft intentionally reviewed, and then disregarded the patent and implemented the same feature as the patent holder tried to sell them. That probably didn't sit very well with the jury. Microsoft should have been a good citizen and tried to strike down the ridiculous patent, rather than just ignore it and hope for the best.
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?
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The patent claims (which define the scope of the patent) are easier to read after going through the specification a bit more closely. This patent is about a particular method of encoding structured data.
Consider the example (given in the patent) of <Chapter><Title>The Secret Life of Data</Title><Para>Data is hostile. </Para>The End</Chapter>. Typical parsers would encode this as some kind of tree.
This patent teaches coding it by creating a "Metacode Map" with six elements encoded as {Element Number, Element, Character Position}: ({1, <Chapter>, 0}, {2, <Title>, 0}, {3, </Title>, 23}, {4, <Para>, 23}, {5, </Para>, 23}, {6, </Chapter>, 46}). The content is then stored separately as one long strong: "The Secret Life ofDataData is hostile. The End"
I haven't read the claims closely enough to say whether they are consistent with the teachings of the patent, but it does seem to be narrower than simply editing XML (or SGML). I also suspect that there aren't a whole lot of infringers since this is an unusual way encoding marked up language. Does Word do this? The jury though so, but the code is all under seal, so it is a bit difficult to check out independently.
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.
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.
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'.