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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.'"
Really if MS decided to lobby against patent trolls they could have saved themselves the trouble in the first place.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
It's crappy technology (and there is prior art too). However, it happens to be the format that Microsoft uses in Microsoft Office's native XML format. I think Microsoft used it because it maps more naturally onto Microsoft Office's internal data structures. The correct way to accomplish this goal is, of course, with style sheets.
ODF, instead, uses XML markup the way it was intended to, so the patent shouldn't apply.
The patent may also be the reason for Microsoft's sudden reversal and support of ODF a couple of years ago.
The "easy technical workaround" for Microsoft is to dump their crappy OOXML format (which infringes this patent) and switch completely to ODF (which doesn't seem to).
Maybe this patent lawsuit is the reason why Microsoft started supporting ODF in the first place.