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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.'"
Does that mean the next version of Office will really be a re-branded version of Office 97?
... die by sword.
A statement that could be applied to more or less all software patents I've seen so far.....
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
I seem to remember that this is where patent trolls are born. Wonder what they did to make this judge unhappy.
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.
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
Contact them and express your hatred.
I actually like Open Office more then Office 2007, it doesn't have that rotten ribbon that makes it a pain in the backside to find things.
Preview the Office 2007 Ribbon-Like UI Floated For OpenOffice.Org
Lately it seems that the big companies are getting affected by patent trolls more than the little guys (they have more money). And the big corps have enough political clout to push through patent reform laws. So if they are getting hammered like this, why aren't they lobbying for patent reform? Are they just not getting hit hard enough?
I am glad that the courts are being stern enough to enforce their ruling, anyone not following through on a verdict should
be held accountable, that being said, I do feel very bad for M$, as the amount given for the fine is way outrageous seeing as the XML format is an open source format, and belongs to the people anyways.
The judge was misguided when he came up with a number, and I am sure needed a new courtroom, with maybe some new staff and decided that M$ should foot his bill. No IT personnel in their right mind would have come up with this number! I would like to see the breakdown of how he came up with this number, and I can also see why M$ has not given any money yet.
To be fair, even if M$ was not in the past, and M$ is the most evil doer out there, I think this is bigger then M$ itself, in that it sets a precedent, and like all things American, this is way out of hand, and has been blown way out of proportion. Only in the US can someone burn themselves stupidly with coffee, and blame McDonalds for giving them coffee that hot....I know 0 people who drink their coffee lukewarm...
The enemy of your enemy is your friend.
... unless they're both enemies, and they're really big, then you just stand back and be happy that they're not fighting you.
So when does the O'Reilly "Learning XML Patents" book hit the shelves and what animal will grace the cover?
To represent patent lawyers everywhere.
If the patent office remains the shambles it is now, eventually there will be no such thing as an exercisable patent. Given that any patent will immediately be usurped by Chinese entrepreneurs, the patent office practically only penalises companies in the U.S. Add to that the business of patenting "scratching your ass", is worth shy of $300 million, I can't see any remedy.
The patent is on an editor capable of manipulating Architecture (Presentation) of a document and its content separately.
An HTML editor that supports manipulating HTML and CSS separately would be a blatant violation.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid your trolling simply doesn't measure up to the high standards we have here at Slashdot. You see, unlike at digg or fark, we here at Slashdot have a rich tradition of truly great trolling, and because of this we try to attract only the best and brightest of the trolling community. Our trolls have gone on to lead very rich and lucrative careers in exciting and rewarding fields such as shills for Microsoft and Comcast management. Who do you think came up with the "Word incompatibilities" and "Weird Excel Math" bugs? That's right, a former Slashdot troll!
So please, in the future put more care and thought into your trolling. Remember that you are walking the path blazed by such luminaries as the GNAA and that you stand beside such greats as the shit eater troll and the ASCII goatse guy. So in the future try to remember the greats that came before you along with your trolling peers and live up to their high standards. Maybe if you troll hard you too will join the greats and have your portrait in the trolling hall of fame!(Currently located in the mens room of the Hooters restaurant in Paramus,NJ) Thank you for your time and may you have a successful career trolling here at slashdot!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm just saying... if you cannot use your court for justice, perhaps you should not have one at all. Perhaps the gentle folk of East Texas could then reflect on the role of their humble district as it relates to the rest of the country in comparison to their perceived need for a local court system. -Hope
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.
The season to hunt patentrolls is now officially open, any weapon is usable (bonus points to weapons like swords, forks and claws)
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Anyone else stop reading after they saw "a judge in a Texas court"? I'm not a Microsoft fan, but this is getting ridiculous.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Who is the bad guy here? It seems as though Microsoft has been hoisted on their own petard. Maybe this will help MS to wake up and become a leader in patent reform, or hopefully they will appeal and win leading to an invalidation of software patents. Software patents just seem to be bad news all around.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
So what does t mean that the patent in question has been withdrawn? http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5787499.html
To be clear: not just any HTML editor. WYSIWYG editors that:
So for instance, editors that display what is architecturally the title of the document, allow you to right click, and change form elements.
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.
For those that are all happy and "Yay, MSFT got screwed!" I would suggest looking at this picture explaining the patent in question and seriously think about it. From the looks of it this patent is so vague pretty much ANYTHING that uses the XML format to manipulate data in any way would could possibly be looking at a lawsuit, should this patent troll decide they are a potential cash cow. This includes OO.o. How many FLOSS applications use XML in some way? Because they have all just been put at risk until this patent is either invalidated or their ability to use XML is removed.
If this is held up then XML looks to be a dead format, and least here in the USA. The patent is just too vague to make it worth the risk, and this includes OO.o ODF which IIRC uses XML as well. If this isn't proof that software patents need to be thrown in a fire I don't know what is. If this stands it doesn't matter how many patents one has, or how much work one puts into making a new format, as all it will take is a patent troll playing "buzzword bingo" and getting a broad enough patent to kill any format dead.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
I'd probably have more antipathy if I paid full price for the package (yes, I know OOo is free, but the VBA support in it is negligible, and I like (correction - am used to) using this to get stuff done).
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
... tooth4tooth.
That was so close! One of the largest vendors of Microsoft products is Dell, which happens to be in the Western District of Texas.
Better luck next time!
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
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."
Poetic justice really...
Hope is the currency of fools
When this court shuts down the likes of Buffalo WiFi products, Slashdot hates this court. :-/
However when this court slams down on Microsoft, Slashdot loves the judge.
Go Figure
A US court is a court of the Federal government; it also happens to always mean the US Supreme Court when used in citations. What the uber-parent header should state is "Texas Court."
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Who are we supposed to favor in this fight? Microsoft or the patent troll?
I can't quite figure it out myself.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
There is supposed to be a requirement that a patent not be awarded if the idea would be obvious to anyone skilled in the area. Seeing as XML was designed to have 'applications' such as word processor document formats how is this not obvious? It's like having a patent on cutting boards with a saw. The saw has instructions for cutting boards, and was designed and built to cut boards, so it seems to me that the OBVIOUS thing to do with a saw would be to cut a board, and having purchased the saw, it just doesn't seem right to pay someone royalties for having the bright idea of using a saw designed to cut boards to cut boards.
...
A submarine patent claim in Texas? Wow, who would have guessed?
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
If we have sunk to new depths, it is by having giants stand upon our shoulders
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
Is this that "East Texas Patent-Troll-Friendly District" that came up a few weeks ago?
God dammit, Texas.
That's what they'd like you to think.
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.
1.Microsoft and their army of lawyers grind i2i into dust by proving prior art for the i2i patent (or proving why it doesn't apply to Word and OOXML)
or 2.i2is patent is declared valid and Microsoft is forced to stop selling and supporting Word versions with XML document formats. Given that Microsoft cant do that (because of all the thousands of docx files out there), the only option for Microsoft in this case is for them to lobby congress for patent change in a way that makes i2is patent invalid. (which would be a good thing)
...which is strangely appropriately said regarding the story itself. I wish there was an "insightful troll, +1" mod!
If history is any lesson, when you try to take something the gubmint uses (rim's blackberry), your case will lost to you no matter how good your case is (valid or not). MS Office is widely used throughout the US government and I do not see them changing for some niggling reason like a Canadian company has a vague patent. We will go to war with Canadia (and their Queen will allow us to), before MS Word stops being sold. i4i will soon be branded "Drug Dealers" or "Terrorist". Sure hope i4i does not have to travel to the US... I feel a ground swell for some Manifest Destiny. Someone call Dobbs! Canadia must be ours.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Maybe you are trolling, or maybe I'm reading the posts with a jaundiced eye. Either way, I'm not seeing too many posts favoring the judge here. I think you will find our contempt for patents & particularly patent trolls still trumps our contempt for Microsoft.
Well, Microsoft now has a really good reason to simply accept ODF.
Does this ruling mean that MS's open standard XML competitor to ODF is now also SOL?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"anybody who has ever worked in business management knows these very simple rules of business. Morals are shit, cash is king"
On the one side I am glad I can walk holding my head high and saying I have never ever broken my ethical and moral standards in the name of business.
On the other hand it is scary that somebody doing business today is prepared to endorse such an statement in such a casual manner.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sounds like CSS to me - which everyone uses every time the open up a browser.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That is moving the industry forward and creating lots of jobs for us techies. I pity the lawyers that are starving due to this innovative environment that is being created by software patents.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What do the Apple Apps Store and US Patent Office have in common?
1: If you're turned down the first time you just keep submitting until you find an idiot who will grant you application.
2: Neither operates by any consistent set of rules.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Because if they would buy the US congressmen to enact laws abolishing software and business models patents, then we would not be in this mess.
The big companies simply can't patent everything (it is ideas we are talking about, that is what software patents are, software patents are asking that people stop being people and stop solving problems), as long as software patents have any legal credibility this kind of cases will continue unabated.
All the big players in the IT industry should band together and buy enough congress people in order to pass the necessary laws to stop this nonsense.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The ruling was handed down in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which is a US federal court located in Texas, not a Texas Court. And the ruling was based on federal patent law, not on some provision of Texas law, and applies to sales in the whole of the US.
The US had eyed the whole American continent as its natural area of influence, it didn't conquest it all because it was too big to manage.
Texas was a small step in that way, the history of how the Texan settlers, supported by the US government, gained "independence" is a shameful chapter of the many the US is responsible for on its long history of abuse of the countries in the American continent.
From Wikipedia:
"Many new settlers to Texas openly flouted Mexican law, especially the prohibition against slavery. This, combined with several attempts by the United States to purchase Texas, convinced Mexican authorities that immigration should be halted."
Lets not forget the roots of the Texan "independence": continous attempts of the US to buy it from Mexico without success.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Software patents are descriptions of thoughts that can be represented 100% accurately with natural languages and speech.
Software patents are a direct intrusion in the freedom of speech liberal democracies are supposed to champion.
The patentability of physical devices is another matter, since the capital investment to design and build a working device is not small.
Ideas are cheap, anybody can have them and express them, it stands to reason that any idiot with money to pay a Texan patent lawyer can hold big swathes of the IT industry hostage.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That might be an argument against Microsoft's recent patent on using XML for a word processor document format, but is hardly an argument against i4i's patent on a particulary way of handling data, regardless of serialization format, containing both a raw content stream and tags that apply at points within that stream.
(Note that I am not saying that there aren't reasonable arguments based on obviousness, prior art, or other bases against i4i's patent, just that "XML was intended to be used for word processor document formats, so its use for them is obvious" isn't even close to one of them, since that's not what i4i's patent covers.)
It's ironic that i4i, when read out loud, sounds like "eye for eye" ;)
This ruling will be bad for "bidnis".
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
If we have sunk to new depths, it is by having giants stand upon our shoulders
I thought it was from standing in the footprints of giants.
If a giant tries to stand on your shoulders, you'll probably find yourself in the footprint fairly fast, albeit not standing.
Exactly my point.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
I would think they could offer a free license if they wanted, but I don't know what sort of prejudice they can show in doing it.
IANAL
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
I think there are two questions that you're not considering.
1. The patent may be invalid as it may be construed as "overly broad." You really can't patent "everything custom". I'm sure that's an argument that Microsoft's lawyers will make on appeal - whether they succeed or not remains to be seen.
2. If the patent is upheld then the OpenOffice (and virtually everybody else who can read/write custom XML) guys are possibly in violation too. Just because they went after the deep pockets first doesn't mean that a lot of other folks aren't going to be next.
I think it's most likely that Microsoft settles with i4i for some lesser amount and the whole situation goes away.
-B-
"Steve Ballmer is currently holding the entire planet hostage, threatening to 'push the button' on the 'global Windows kill switch' known as 'Windows Genuine Advantage'. Billions await their data's fate until Ballmer's demands to lift the federal ban on Word and $200,000,000 in cash..."
Isn't fiction fun?
8==8 Bones 8==8
While I can't say for sure they won't go after others, something the article doesn't mention is the fact that i4i went to MS with their technology originally to try and get MS to include it in Office. MS said they weren't interested, and then went ahead and used the technology anyway. I'm not a fan of software patents, so I can't really root for i4i, but I don't exactly feel any sympathy when MS takes their technology without asking and then essentially acts the bully and says "well, if you don't like it, sue us".
How is this any different from what Nisus Writer did in 1989? Nisus also stored the plaintext first and the formatting codes last (albeit in the resource fork).
If another software vendor had been doing it for 10 years at the time of the patent, shouldn't the patent be invalidated on the grounds of prior art?
Well, it may be that I need to read i4i's patent more carefully. On the surface of it it's being reported as "custom XML" which sounds to me like patenting all wheels that aren't made of stone.
-B-
There you have it for being stupid and allowing software patents.
Just look at us here in EU we are smart enough to not have them.. Er.. Wait.. Darn..
Time to move to china
The technology in question reminds me of VTD-XML (Virtual Token Descriptor). Make an index that points into the document, "starting offset and length" as described here: VTD in 30 seconds. i4i's "map" is VTD's "index" + "location cache". But no one's talking about it.
Patent-office-grants-patent-for-using-x-in-way-expressly-designed-to-be-used
Covers 90% of all patent threads in the last ten years
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
I read number of comments criticizing Microsoft for its pro-patent position. I sympathize. However, it must be recognized that many people and many companies depend on Word and other similar products. Free or non-free makes no difference to a software patent. This case is an example of just how disruptive a software patent can be. Too often the software patent cases are against obscure products that most people have never heard of, much less use on a daily basis. That fact just makes the threat of software patents seem remote to most people.
With any luck, the Supreme Court will invalidate a large class of software patents in Bilsky. But even if we win in Bilsky, it is likely the Congress will respond by trying to change the law to overrule the Court. This is a long fight that the League for Programming Freedom (progfree.org) and others have waged for a long time, and a hard battle lies ahead. With any luck, this case will be a wakeup call to the pervasive and often unforeseeable danger posed by software patents. The potential mess grows larger every month as new software patents are issued. The only way out of the mess is to eliminate or curtail software patents. I urge people to take a look at the progfree.org website to see how they could help.
Dean Anderson
President
League for Programming Freedom
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.
So, I just finished reading the patent. Now, I am not a patent lawyer (or any other kind of lawyer), however, I don't think any use of standard XML is in danger from this patent. The patent essentially describes a method that is the exact antithesis of XML. The method described in the patent strips out all metacodes (tags, formatting codes, etc.) from a document and stores them separately. It then creates a separate map of where those codes were applied within the document. The patent isn't explicit in describing exactly how that map would be structured but they do allude to using character count or some other direct mapping method to indicate exactly where within the content the separate structure and formatting instructions should be applied. In this method, absolutely no structure is retained within the document. They aren't specific about this, but it could be construed that even paragraph marks are not to be included within the content itself as they could be considered formatting or structure rather than content.
This is in stark contrast to how XML works in that the structure of the document is marked up directly within the document. Yes, the patent in question mentions SGML and gives an example of SGML content. But in that example, the method strips out the tags from the SGML content and stores them separately. This is not the same as a CSS stylesheet referring to a specific element within an XML document. In that case, the XML document still retains its structure as tags within the document itself. Only the instructions on how to format the document is separate from the document. The document still retains all of its structural metacodes.
To be clear, the method described in the patent does not pertain to the use of XML files themselves. The patent merely uses an SGML file as an example of the type of file that could be converted to the "new" format described within the patent.
What is unclear to me is whether the patent absolutely requires that all metacodes be stripped out of the original document when being converted to this "new" format. Although I could imagine a way to simply take an existing document (with it's current metacodes included) and adding a supplemental formatting/structure map that provides additional information about how to format that original document, it seems to me that the patent only makes claims about using their method with documents wherein the content is entirely devoid of any metacodes whatsoever. Perhaps this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding I may have about patent law. If all major claims have to be violated or if any one claim can be violated in order to be considered infringing on the patent.
While I do not know exactly how Microsoft's "Custom XML" works, it seems that it would have to work by storing the actual address (or index) of the location within the original document where the "Custom XML" should be applied, if it were to be considered infringing on this patent at all. If "Custom XML" works by referencing existing structural metacodes embedded within the original document then that would be no different from any other use of XML or CSS or XSLT. Perhaps only a Texas judge could possibly be confused about the distinctions.
Another thing I have to say about this patent is that it talks a lot about a means to do this and a means to do that but doesn't actually specify the means to do anything other than strip out the metacodes and store them separately. Hell, a high-school programming student could have told you that. You work through the document and store one part in one file and the other part in another file. The algorithms listed in the patent simply use character count to indicate where the codes are supposed to have an effect. Again, basic programming 101. How this patent is non-obvious in any way completely eludes me. Some may say that the basic "idea" of storing metacodes separately from the content was likely unique back in 1994. I beg to differ. Wh
I'm filling this patent: any biological form that may create or solve problems with or without purpose, including any intelligent form that may file patents. Pay me my millions,no