Slashdot Mirror
US Court Tells Microsoft To Stop Selling Word
oranghutan writes "A judge in a Texas court has given Microsoft 60 days to comply with an order to stop selling Word products in their existing state as the result of a patent infringement suit filed by i4i. According to the injunction, Microsoft is forbidden from selling Word products that let people create XML documents, which both the 2003 and 2007 versions let you do. Michael Cherry, an analyst quoted in the article, said, 'It's going to take a long time for this kind of thing to get sorted out.' Few believe the injunction will actually stop Word from being sold because there are ways of working around it. In early 2009, a jury in the Texas court ordered Microsoft to pay i4i $200 million for infringing on the patent. ZDNet has a look at the patent itself, saying it 'sounds a bit generic.'"
Yeah, they just use FUD and the threat of patents to try to scare people away from using Linux.
I think he was talking about Microsoft's embrace of software patents http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2007/03/analysis-microsofts-software-patent-flip-flop.ars
Microsoft has been pro-software-patent since the mid 1990s...
Bill Gate's quote on the subject:
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then they have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can. "
taken from the 1991 memo at http://www.std.com/obi/Bill.Gates/Challenges.and.Strategy
Gates knows software patents are bad for the industry, but Microsoft still lobbys for software patent laws in many countries. They will win in the EU soon...
At first I thought this was BS... the way they're describing this patent (in the articles about it) makes it sound like i4i's patent basically applies to any markup language (XML, SGML, HTML, etc). It does not. What they have a patent on is using a map to locate the tags, so that tags don't interfere with document content. If MS is doing this, it isn't part of standard XML, AFAIK.
Let me say it again: This patent isn't about XML, SGML, CSS, etc. It's pretty specific, and, if Microsoft is actually violating it, it's because of what they're doing differently, not because they're using XML.
All that said, IANAL, so there may well be something important I missed.
No, but that hardly counts because it was TomTom that was the one trolling there, and Microsoft reacted defensively. That was well documented in every Slashdot discussion related to it, but it seems to have been totally forgotten (or deliberately overlooked) by many people in subsequent discussions, with Microsoft coming out as looking like the attacking party.
Just to clarify, becasue the lede is quite misleading: this is not a "Texas court". State courts (e.g., the courts of Texas) do not handle patent infringement disputes or remedies. This is a Federal court located in Texas. The scope of the injunction is therefore nationwide. The fact that it's in Texas is a red herring -- its only significance is that this particular Federal Court (EDTx) has a history of being extremely friendly to patent holders.
The patent is pretty vague. Lotus Notes/Domino has separated data from document (form) for years back into the early nineties. In other words, you could change the form or the view representing the data without affecting the underlying data itself.
From the patent abstract:
"A system and method for seperate manipulation of the archicture and content of a document particularly for data representation and transformations. The systems for use by the computer software developers removes the dependency on the document encoding technology. A map of metacodes found in the document is produced an provided and stored seperately from the document. The map indicates the locatino 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 efficieny of multiple versions and efficiency of operation."
The patent office isn't competent to evaluate this kind of patent (which makes me wonder if they're competent about any others). There's at least two (now expired) patents on LZW compression, with Unisys's being the later of the two. There's a multiplicity of patents which cover RLE or null suppression. Change your terminology a little, and you can get a new patent on the same thing.
In this case, it appears the troll has used the term "metacode" to indicate a formatting code, whereas other patents use other terms. New term = new patent.
Furthermore, the patent isn't on saving a word processing document as an XML file. It's a number of claims around the idea of, instead of storing the "metacodes" inline with the document, storing the raw text of the document and a separate table (their "metacode map") indicating where the "metacodes" would be. Once you've got that idea (which is not at all new), the ways of manipulating it are pretty much standard stuff any decent CS student could figure out. The claims include (but aren't limited to) creating that "metacode map" from the original document with inline "metacodes", and applying the "metacode map" to the raw text to create the document with inline "metacodes".
So if Slashcode takes this message with inline formatting codes, and at any point converts it into pure text and stores the formatting codes separately as a set of pointers into the raw text, Slashdot has violated the patent. Ridiculous.