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"Easy Work-Around" For Microsoft Word's Legal Woes
CWmike writes "Microsoft can likely use an 'easy technical work-around' to sidestep a recent injunction by a Texas federal judge that bars the company from selling Word, a patent attorney said today. 'The injunction doesn't apply to existing product that has already been sold,' said Barry Negrin, a partner with the New York firm Pryor Cashman LLP who has practiced patent and trademark law for 17 years. 'Headlines that say Microsoft can't sell Word are not really true,' said Negrin, pointing out that the injunction granted by US District Court Judge Leonard Davis on Tuesday only prohibits Microsoft from selling Word as it exists now after Oct. 10. 'All Microsoft has to do is disable the custom XML feature, which should be pretty easy to do, then give that a different SKU number from what's been sold so it's easy to distinguish the two versions.'"
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Wow. Just wow. Do yourself a favor next time, and look up the slightest bit of info. The US District Court is a FEDERAL court.
Apparently, ODF is safe from this patent.
Except the company suing them aren't patent trolls. If you took a minute to check out their site, they legitimately offer services that directly relate to what they're suing about.
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 </foo> 31
6 </bar> 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.
If i4i has a better product, they have nothing to worry about. If Microsoft is interested in adding that functionality to word, then they can acquire i4i for a fair price.
It doesn't matter whether or not i4i has a better product. They own the patent on the method their product uses. Microsoft is using that same method in Office without having licensed it from i4i. If they can't reach an agreement on a license fee or buy the patent outright, MS must wait about twenty years for the patent to expire if they want to use this method again.
Except the company suing them aren't patent trolls. If you took a minute to check out their site, they legitimately offer services that directly relate to what they're suing about.
First off I would have to disagree that your assertionis correct (see below). But at the same time I would assert that the technique in question might be on the hairy edge of patentable, making them legitimate--maybe.
Okay so what is the patent about? Well it's not about using XML to store documents. It's about a somewhat specific way of storing xml for documents in file systems or streams that has gains some efficiency over the conventional XML format. Specifically you write the documents plain text out as raw plain text without any XML tags. Then in separate location you write our all the xml tags. After each tag you write a pointer to the chearacter position in the plain text where the tag needs to go. The claim is this means that if you change formats you don't have to re-write the file with the plain text thus making it a lot faster to update (and you can imagine stream on the cloud). The second patented feature is that this allows one to store multiple "views". That is one could have multiple different xml tag sets for the same text body. Besides simply being a view, this is useful also for undo's
So you can see this pertains basically to "fast saves" of big documents, and possibly to cloud applications.
It's pretty easy to imagine other ways to skln this cat if you had too. FOr example, store diffs which I think is how the older MS fast saves work anyhow. But in the cloud world I bet just using XML views rather than diffs is slightly more javascript freindly given all the existing XML based code. plus it makes i more of an open standard.
SO while MS could work around this, it will make the resulting document less open format. a terrible irony.
One could question howver if this is really patent worthy. I'd say maybe. it does have tangible advantages and back when it was patented it might have been the first time for xml to be encoded this way (I have no idea on that). But it also seems kinda obvious. Many XML documents sort of do that in a way already. They insert some labeled format tag which we call a "style" then put the detailed XML description of that "style" in the document header. SOr example apple's pages does that, and presumbaly most processors with style sheets have done that. But that's still a bit different than actuall pointers.
So maybe maybe it's patent worthy. I'd say no. but it's arguable.
ANyhow getting back to the parent's assertion that they market this, well thats nonsense. this is a technique that once you tell it to someone is generic. No one would hire you to implement it for their own product so you can't sell any services here. And any specific implementation is irrelevant. FOr example this is not going to affect their competitiveness in selling a word processor.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
whose legal interpretations ONLY apply to that district. They can keep selling in any other district, including the three other Texas districts and not have any legal ramifications, until someone decides to file a lawsuit.
My biggest gripe with software patents is the asinine frequency with which they are granted, despite the abundance of significant prior art and the lack of desire for patent examiners to reject applications based on said prior art.
I hate to break it to all the budding young developers-but their projects, however ingenious, are typically based upon tried and true computer science fundamentals and hard work, nothing else. There seem to be relatively few fundamental advances in computer science. Good examples of what I would consider patent-worthy inventions: Java virtual machine, .NET(yep, I said it), MS Office "ribbon" UI(even though I fucking hate it).
I also believe software patents should be limited to a term of 3 years, and some could make me a convincing argument even that is too long. Right now, software patents are nothing but a hindrance to the market and a leach to the hard work of others. How many companies have been pushed away from OSS because of litigious bastards?
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
In addition, even removing OOXML won't solve the entire problem with this patent. Despite TFA (and the summary) saying
The injunction doesn't apply to existing product that has already been sold
that is only true for Microsoft - but not for Microsoft customers . A user of Word can be sued by the patent holder, simply because that user infringes upon the patent (that the user didn't write the code doesn't matter at all). If a user is in fact sued, Microsoft is committed to indemnify them, which means... Microsoft is once more fighting this patent in the courts.
Bottom line, it won't end until Microsoft buys a license for the patent, or until the patent is invalidated. Microsoft's usual strategy is to fight in the courts until the end of time, but given this injunction, that isn't an option (the patent holder can sue Microsoft users tomorrow and get an injunction against them).
Either Microsoft miraculously gets the injunction cancelled, or it buys a license (for many, many billions of dollars - the patent holder would be stupid to ask for anything less). There is no "easy work-around" despite what TFA says.
TFA may well be a Microsoft effort to keep its share price from dropping due to this debacle. It might work, Wall Street isn't that bright about this stuff.