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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.'"
Nah, removing the ooxml code is easy. Telling your customers "all of the documents you've saved since 2006 won't be readable by new installations" is the hard part. This is a non-story, we all know obviously they can take the code out, but it doesn't help their users who have docx documents.
Maybe they could offer a downloadable component like they have for old versions of Word?
Also, what does this mean for openoffice?
Spoken like a true end-user. As a developer, almost every single time I've ever said something would be "easy to do" code-wise it has come back to bite me in the ass. I've learned not to use that phrase for anything, especially for things that really do seem easy to do. Now it is "I'll see what is involved in that request and get back to you." End-users always seem to think things will be easy to change. Disabling a feature in a widely used application like Word that likely has a ton of legacy code in it is probably not as easy as one might think. I'd also be skeptical about this statement considering it is coming from the opposing lawyer and not from one of MS's own engineers.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Or does he not quite understand the reaction of a few million angry customers, who've just discovered that "Word" now doesn't read "Word documents" and have been blandly told "Oh, we changed the SKU number from 3454234 to 3454235, didn't you notice? You should have seen KB65564 for clarification of Microsoft Office Product SKUs."
Seriously, doing that would make the whole Vista Ready vs. Vista Capable debacle look like a 10 dollar parking ticket. What a stupid plan.
I'd assume that whichever judge imposed the injunction would take a very dim view of MS offering a "product + download" to circumvent the injunction; but IANAL, and there could be some subtlety that makes that legal(incidentally, I can well imagine that, if it applies to the OOXML plugins for 2003, there'll be some weeping and gnashing of teeth among certain major corporate customers).
If Ms got rid of the ability to add custom XML, they would never be able to Extend the specification they proposed, and so Extinguish competition while everyone else plays catch up.
I trust Microsoft as far as I could comfortably spit a dead rat
We all write our comments in Word. Because the Internet Explorer doesn't have a spell checker.*
* (just a guess)
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
They could hire someone to dig through the IBM research journals and patents on the General Markup Language and its successor SGML, and find some prior art. They might even have some prior art of their own related to RTF. This patent sucks; it's on a basic technique that anyone writing a program to read a document with inline tags would at least consider, and I find it hard to believe it wasn't actually used on occasion.
Using patents to prevent Microsoft from competing is anti-competitive.
That's because patents are inherently anti-competitive. A patent is a limited-term monopoly expressly granted by the government. That's the whole idea.
And your naive and simplified free market solution is unrealistic. Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of free markets too. But they're not flawless and universally efficient. If i4i were to compete head-to-head against Microsoft, they would get crushed regardless of the quality of their product.
Fortunately for them, the USPTO has, pursuant to its statutory authority (which is well-grounded in the constitution, unlike about 90% of what the federal government does), granted them a limited monopoly. They now have the right to enforce that monopoly in the courts, which means they get a chance to compete.
The alternative is that MegaCorps get to decide every single product and service that is available to you. There would be no way for disruptive technologies to get a footing. All startups could be crushed at inception, because their ideas (the only asset where they may possibly have an edge on the MegaCorp) would be free for the taking. MegaCorp gets to decide what you can buy and what you can't (and in what form). Sounds like Utopia, huh?
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.