"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.'"

Comments

Really...

[Darkness404]

Really if MS decided to lobby against patent trolls they could have saved themselves the trouble in the first place.

Re:Really...

[Zordak]

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?

Is this guy an idiot?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Patent is "markup indirection"

[baboo_jackal]

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:



--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. :P

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.