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Microsoft Files "Emergency Motion" To Ship Word
adeelarshad82 writes "Several days after a judge ordered Microsoft to halt sales of Word and handed down $290M in fines, the software giant has moved to stop the ban. On Friday Microsoft filed an emergency motion to stop the judgment and waive the bond requirement, according to court filings. The actual document was filed under seal, so the full contents of the request have not yet been made public."
the sealed bond is just the publicly available document and the rest is just stuffed with $100 bills.
Even if this is unquestionably a patent violation, the Supreme Court has already held, in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C. (2006), that an injunction prohibiting sale of the infringing product is not necessarily the appropriate remedy in all cases. Rather, the traditional four factors for issuing an injunction must be balanced: 1) that the injury is irreparable; 2) that there are inadequate alternate remedies to compensate for the injury; 3) that the balance of hardships favors the plaintiff; and 4) that an injunction does not harm the public interest. Microsoft has an least a plausible argument that they are not satisfied in this case, and that alternate remedies (perhaps money damages) would be better than an injunction against sale, even if indeed Word is infringing.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In this case it appears that the courts will not have the last word.
I wonder if the request was delivered as a Word document.
Nope. MS got what it deserved.
They did not question patent's validity in fear that it might undermine their portfolio. So let them suffer.
They argued both that the patent was invalid and that they didn't infringe on it, in any case. They lost on both points, but they certainly made the argument.
What was filed under seal:
Dear Judge, The world will end if we can't continue shipping Word.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You're wrong, and overmoderated.
There is no patent troll in this case.
i4i is an actual company, that sells actual products. They worked with Microsoft, and Microsoft, line for line, stole their code. i4i subsequently sued them, and won.
There is no patent troll in this case.
This isn't a "state-level" judge, its a federal judge.
The Constitution of the United States lays out the specific kinds of cases in which the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction, other than that, all federal judicial power rests initially in lower trial courts, with the Supreme Court only hearing appeals (and, for the most part, not even direct appeals.)
i4i is an actual company, that sells actual products. They worked with Microsoft, and Microsoft, line for line, stole their code. i4i subsequently sued them, and won.
Hi, uninformed person here. If they stole code line for line, why is this a patent case and not a copyright infringement case?
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
As far as I'm concerned, whoever wins in the end, all that's been demonstrated is how absurd software patents are.
The current location of your daughter is in the attached file. Unfortunately for you, this file can only be read by the latest software version of Word we're commercially releasing next week.
--
File attached: clownfart.wdoc
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Wrong. True, a traditional patent troll is one that makes no real products. However, MS's activity against Linux can certainly be seen as "trollish", because of their vague threats meant to stir up FUD. At least the traditional patent trolls have the decency to state which patents are being violated, even if they're BS patents.
So, unless you can come up with a better term for their despicable behavior, I'll continue to use the term "troll" for MS.
Except, there are no patent trolls in this case. i4i ships and sells an actual product, the patented code for which Microsoft actually stole after working with them.
citation needed. All I see here is a patent case, which has nothing to do with copyright infringement which you accuse MS of.
Besides, any company stupid enough to work with MS and not expect to be ripped off deserves to be ripped off. They should even make a special law granting MS the right to do that, since they've done it so many times in the past yet these stupid companies keep trusting MS to not do it again.
I hate to be on Microsoft's side but they are right on this one. Maybe if they fight off enough patent trolls they will join in efforts to reform patents out of self preservation.
The problem is that they themselves patent just about everything under the sun.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Except that the plaintiffs are not patent trolls and have a real and verifiable grievance.
if this injunction stands and Microsoft then wins the case...
This isn't a preliminary injunction, they already lost the case.
Why should a state judge not be able to rule that a company selling a product in his jurisdiction is illegal? Just like this federal judge ruled selling a product in his jurisdiction is illegal.
By the way, global would be outside the jurisdiction of the US supreme court anyway.
I would be willing to bet that the same thing will happen that happened when they lost the CP/M case. They paid the 'injured' off, continued to ship product during the entire episode ( in that case, decades ), made far more then the pay off was and it was all swept under the carpet, chalking it up to 'cost of doing business'.
Normal operating procedures for a monopoly.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's a bit too narrow.
Justice Bradley stated, in 1882
Those "speculative schemers" are patent trolls. It doesn't matter whether they actually use each "shadow of a shade of an idea" in a product of their own; they're patent trolls even if they make their own product, as long as they try to prevent others from using those non-novel or obvious ideas.
By that definition, i4i is a patent troll, and Microsoft has, in other instances, acted as a patent troll.
Not making a product is neither necessary nor sufficient for patent-trollism. An organization which mainly does research might legitimately obtain a patent without any intent of developing it themselves. And an organization which makes a real product might engage in patent-trolling to put competitors out of business, or to obtain a revenue stream when their own product has failed.
The system is so broken that they'd be sued by every small-time squatter who had the gumption to slip an idea through the patent office. It's cheaper to just register everything you can think of and then out-lawyer your competition. Microsoft ain't the only ones doing it either.
And what's that exactly? That they store documents in a single XML file? That's kinda the point of XML, and indeed of most of the SGML derivatives. The concept has been around for decades. What they have is a product based off of a rather old idea, and then Microsoft implemented that rather old idea itself, thus rendering their product worthless. That's not an argument for them getting some sort of monetary reparations, it's an argument for companies not basing their revenue stream on decades-old concepts that probably are older than most of their software engineers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is all getting pretty pedantic, but maybe we just need a whole new term for MS's behavior, since I can't think of any other instance where a company went around bad-mouthing its competitors, claiming it has patents which they infringe, but refusing to disclose what those patents may be, just to get people to stop using the competitors' products.
Or, if we wanted to use a more lax definition of "troll", we could say it's anyone attempting to use the patent system (with its lax to non-existent safeguards against abuse) to profit in ways that don't involve direct competition. A normal company using patents does so to protect products it actually makes and sells, and only moves to litigation when a competitor violates one of those patents in its own competing product, such as with someone selling a knock-off of a patented technology. Anything other than this seems like "trollish" behavior to me, amounting to abuse of the patent system. Under this definition, i4i sounds like a troll since I don't see any "i4i" word processors on the market.
actually if they did steal the code line-for-line it would be both a patent and copyright infringement case.
On Friday Microsoft filed an emergency motion to stop the judgment and waive the bond requirement, according to court filings. The actual document was filed under seal, so the full contents of the request have not yet been made public.
Why on Earth does a way seal court documents even exist?
Some people have the radical notion that perhaps an idea can't be owned by one person.
The patent system was not made for people to own ideas, it was made for people to own IMPLEMENTATIONS of ideas, this is where patents tend to fall flat on their ass with software. With every man and his dog patenting 'the ability to do x'.
No, its okay because Microsoft uses patents as weapons and not just defensively, and so they are now getting what they deserve. See the TomTom case for example.
If you know a contractor that's been arrested many, many times for ripping off his clients, stealing their stuff from their homes when he's entrusted to do jobs in them, etc., has been in the news for that, and has even ripped off your next-door neighbor, would you hire that contractor to work in your home? If you did, I would call you stupid, and I actually would say that you deserved to be ripped off for your stupidity.
It's the same thing with MS. Every company that works with them is burned.
I wonder what the reason for this is and how frequently is this request granted.
Any way, that's at least the second thing I remember this summer (the first being the buy now at 60% off deal on the various Windows 7s) that suggests Microsoft has a cash flow issue at the moment.
Regarding the judgment, remember 90 million was tacked on by the judge to make Microsoft pay for its lawyers' behavior.
"Why on Earth does a way seal court documents even exist?"
To protect trade secrets under dispute, or to protect the identities of minors. Those are the two reasons that spring directly to mind. I'm sure there are others.
Microsoft already lost the case, they were already ordered to pay $200 million which they have so far refused to do.
Normally, once the court finds you liable and orders you to pay, you have to actually do what they ordered you to do, or face sanctions and additional injunctions, like they have.
MS has only themselves to blame, they should have paid the $200 million to the court.
By that definition, i4i is a patent troll
Except for that whole "without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts" part.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
If they argued the right way on invalidity (in re Bilski...) they would have probably won the case. But the full-court press on invalidity would have hindered their future positioning on other legal fronts forevermore.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
After reading the verdict its pretty clear that Microsoft knew about this patent and i4i long before they implemented custom XML. Its probable that they did infact learn about custom XML through i4is products and patents. Internal mails was shown where Microsoft did mention i4i and even their patent numbers.
It looks as if Microsofts counsels has done pretty much anything possible to defend themselves but the case is so darn clearcut that they just cant win. The problem for Microsoft is that Office Open XML has now become i4is bitch while ODF is wholly in the clear and unencumbered by i4i patents (according to i4i). Since ECMA-376 contains the i4i patented technology in the standard its worthless to anyone in the US.
HTTP/1.1 400
Which they have already used to threaten open source projects. Not terribly defensive.
Or else who will i4i shake down next? OpenOffice? ...
Err... wake up.
As noted in several comments, i4i themselves have stated that Openoffice/ODF are *not* affected by this patent.