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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.'"
... die by sword.
Yes, it's called Open Office.
Even if you're not a Microsoft fan, you have to admit this is pretty frapped up.
According to the ZDNet article, Microsoft owns a patent on XML in word processor documents, but i4i owns the patent for "anything that touches custom XML formatting" in said documents.
The way i4i's patent sounds, this would also affect other things like OpenOffice.org and anything else that uses XML formatted documents. That's like, the entire current generation of word processors, isn't it?
I'm starting to wonder if patent lawyers can pick and choose who grants their patents from the Patent Office (they pick the non-tech literate ones) like they do with the courts when they sue over patent infringement (e.g. most patent cases are from east Texas).
-JJS
Remember, Microsoft pushed 'Custom XML' as a key distinguishing feature of OOXML during the fight to get it approved in ISO. 'Custom XML' was the reason (according to them) why ODF was not sufficient, feature-wise. IANAL, but if Microsoft cannot implement "Custom XML" without licensing this patent from i4i for a quarter of a billion dollars, then doesn't this likely mean that no one else is free to use "custom XML" either? Ergo, OOXML is not an open standard.
part of the deal to file these patent suits should be having to go and live in that county - then they can be happy together in their own little alternate reality.
...I obey the laws of physics....
Aside from XML, doesn't CSS violate this ridiculous patent?
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
The circle of life:
According to This Patent, they invented having the XML hold the word processing info... It's just too bad that they didn't invent a way to write the xml file itself.
So, in the current US situation, no one can create an xml word processing document, as you can't write the xml, but even if you could, you aren't allowed to store the font and page number in the file.
This is beyond ridiculous
So what does t mean that the patent in question has been withdrawn? http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5787499.html
It will be the Dodo.
Here's hoping that software patents become as dead as the Dodo.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
IMHO it is lovely when patent trolls hit country sized companies who themselves lobby against any change in patent system.
Imagine if MS, IBM, Sun, Apple, SAP sized companies and FSF, Redhat kind of open companies&orgs gathered in a conference, use decades of their expertise to fix the patent system and provide suggestions to US Congress. Wouldn't they be taken serious?
They are looking for the problem themselves.
My guess is that they risk losing more licensing fees through patent reform than they lose to the legal process of fighting the trolls. In other words, if patent reform went through, they could stand to lose more than they gain.
It may not be true for all, but it likely will be true for some, and if those "some" have the cash to support lobbying efforts...
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Or maybe MS will patent the patent office. That way the patent office can no longer issue patents. So that invalidates pretty much every patent. Including the MS patent which patented the patent office. But if that gets invalidated..
I'm getting to like the new ribbons, but sometimes the location of a function seems a tad obscure....
So, instead of finding function X in obscure location Y, now you instead have to find it in obscure location Z? ;-)
Kind of, now you have to find function X in Obscure location Y,Z
Does this patent not cover the same sort of things that RTF already does?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
They could still get an injunction against distribution if the patent is upheld. Intellectual property law is primarily about intellectual property rights (free as in speech), not profits (free as in beer).
This happens with, for example, MP3 decoders. There is a patent on the MP3 format, it's valid, and the patent holders have monetized MP3 by charging a small fee for every player distributed.
That's "distributed", not "sold". It doesn't matter if you're making money off it, it only matters that you are distributing patented work that someone else owns distribution rights to.
So many Linux distros are sent out without an MP3 decoder, because that would mean that the distro manager would have to pay a fee to the MP3 patentholder for every copy distributed.
Some just ignore the licensing issues and either distribute the software "assuming" you have paid or will pay the fee, or distribute it in a country where the relevant patent is invalid (and if you happen to import it into a country where it is a problem, that's your lookout).
OpenOffice could (as others have stated) revert back to the Microsoft DOC format, but there's still a potential issue with the copies that are currently out there.
Note that I said "potential". i4i does not have to sue anyone - they could simply offer anyone using OpenOffice a free license to use XML data formats. Their patent, their rules.
In fact, the name, "i4i", implies the old "eye for an eye" rule. It's possible that this is a group of Free Software folks who have managed to get a patent on something obvious (as Microsoft has done so many times in the past) and wants to stick it to Microsoft the same way Microsoft keeps harassing open source folks with their patents on ones and zeros.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
It's a relatively inexpensive way to (a) increase the legitimacy of their claim by taking someone to court who cannot afford a proper defense and (b) sending a message that free software with their IP is not tolerated to scare anyone off any attempts to open source the IP.
That way, they direct all uses of their IP to commercial products where they can get their pound of flesh.
They WANT the people who have paid their licensing fees to continue using the stuff, so they keep collecting their fees. So, yes, they could easily do that to avoid competition against their licenseholders' product lines.
Microsoft may yet settle with this company in a licensing agreement. If that happens, Microsoft would be (at that moment) the only company licensed to provide XML-formatted word processing documents. It would be to Microsoft's competitive advantage to help i4i knock down any more troublemakers to maintain their temporary exclusive. :)
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
As I stated in another post on another thread (or maybe this one, who knows), "i4i" would be pronounced "Eye for Eye", as in "an eye for an eye".
It could be that the patent troll, in this case, is a group that acquired a few patents so they could stick it to Microsoft for the whole "FAT/NTFS" thing, or whatever. Microsoft's certainly got a lot of patent property and has used it to scare the bejeezus out of a lot of people in Penguinland.
Maybe "i4i" will suddenly announce a cross-licensing settlement with Microsoft where everyone (Microsoft included!) gets XML formats as long as everyone gets FAT, NTFS, and a few other Microsoft properties free for use.
So, yeah, that crack pipe's got some pretty good stuff, man, thanks for sharing. Whoo boy.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
So the patent works like this: Instead of storing markup within a document, you instead store the markup separately from the raw data and then map each markup element to a character position in the raw data, like this:
:P
--Original document--
<foo>This is a foo</foo><foo><bar>This is a foo bar</bar></foo>
--i4i patented storage--
Raw document:
This is a foo This is a foo bar
Metadata Map:
1 <foo> 0
2 </foo> 13
3 <foo> 14
4 <bar> 14
5 </bar> 31
6 </foo> 31
The idea is that you should be able to edit the raw data, or the markup, independently of one another. The patent outlines three core scenarios: 1) Taking an existing document with inline markup and separating the text and the markup, 2) Generating a "separate data and markup" document from scratch, and 3) Combining the markup and raw data of a doc generated from scenario 1 or 2 back together to produce a document with the markup inline.
So why is this neat? The patent claims that you can edit both the content and the markup independently of one another. Except that you would require a specialized editor that manipulates both components to be able to do this and still maintain the "mapping" of markup to raw data. Hate to say it, but I can already do this on normal, inline-markup documents using notepad, or any WYSIWYG HTML editor.
The other claim is that you could apply any map to any raw data. Except that, unless the character positions of semantic elements in the raw data were exactly where the "Metadata Map" expected them to be, the result would be a huge mess. Practically speaking, the application of a metadata map to multiple documents (since the map is based on character position) would most likely require additional inline tags to align the separate metadata to the content, thus defeating the whole purpose of the patent. Or maybe you could establish a "standard sentence length" in order to allow one map to be applied to different documents - that would be great.
I'm having a hard time understanding how the technology described in this patent is actually useful at all, let alone how Microsoft has infringed on it. In fact, if they *did* actually use this technology, then they deserve to be punished for using a stupid idea.