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i4i Says OpenOffice Does Not Infringe Like MS Word
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "After the permanent injunction barring Microsoft from selling Microsoft Word, many armchair lawyers and pundits wondered how the ruling would affect OpenOffice. The company with the patent, i4i, believes that OpenOffice does not infringe upon it. But lest anyone think that therefore ODF will win out over OOXML, keep in mind that Microsoft has its own broad XML document patent, which issued just two weeks ago, having been filed in December 2004, and they're telling the Supreme Court to apply the Bilski ruling narrowly, so that it doesn't invalidate patents like theirs (and i4i's). After all, unlike most companies and individuals, Microsoft can afford $290 million infringement fines. Then again, given that Microsoft's new patent has only two independent claims (claim #1 and claim #12), and both of those claims 'comprise' something using an 'XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features,' maybe they wouldn't be that hard to work around if you just make sure any otherwise infringing format is only associated with an application lacking in the feature richness department."
The claim about the MS patent affecting ODF is not true. See here for details.
I wonder if this is a decision made based off knowledge of the law, or based off of the respective wallet size of software organizations.
Why spend money on litigation against OpenOffice if you don't get a $290 mil return on investment.
We lose.
if you just make sure any otherwise infringing format is only associated with an application lacking in the feature richness department
Any XML document is associated with the feature "poorest" application imaginable; the plain text editor. Perhaps a text editor with UTF-16 support or such, but still something that handles characters and nothing else.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
What does XML have to do with anything? Microsoft's XML based office format notwithstanding, XML is a text-based data storage and interchange format. Putting things in a container to make them easy to store and transport cannot possibly be non-obvious or novel. Can I get a patent on storing the Amero in a billfold (digital or otherwise)?
For all the talk about improving patent quality, the patent holders real colors come out when they start challenging Bilski.
What about notepad or notepad++ or vi or emacs or wordperfect or abiword or kate or ped or ...
I can create custom XML with any text editor. i4i, whether they realise it or not, have just completely destroyed the proprietary software industry in one fell swoop.
For I can also create custom XML in a hex editor, or a spreadsheet or ... you name it and I can probably use it to create custom XML.
It all belongs to i4i now.
Soooo... i4i, are you going to strengthen the notoriously weak statistical functions in your spreadsheet product? What's that? You never took math? Just an MBA? Oh, I see. Well then, what do we do now?
The courts just don't have a clue. They do not realise the implications of this decision. Multi-billion dollar implications. The death of an entire industry implications. Lawyers will never understand science and should stop pretending they do. The DNA thing is another example, I have been telling them that for years.
The law has no place in science. None. To paraphrase a great Canadian: The law has no place in the laboratories of the nation.
Although, that quote is oddly applicable, as blind (along with lame, deaf, and dumb) is more or less the result of the ongoing software patent trends.
"just make sure any otherwise infringing format is only associated with an application lacking in the feature richness department."
Not emacs then...
It would not matter what a third party thinks as long as i4i thinks it is not infringing. Unlike trademarks, patents do not expire unless enforced. So i4i is within rights to sue Microsoft and not Sun.
From the perspective of a company which invests into integrating its business processes with the office software that it is using (that's the area of application where the kind of stuff that the patent talks about is relevant), it matters a lot whether you can base your work on ODF without having to fear that essential features (for your purposes) might get removed from future versions due to patent trouble.
While I agree with you in principle, I have to believe that Microsoft lawyers could find some way to make a case out of it if they wanted to. And they just might do that if they were ever losing the format wars. That said, they greatly prefer to FUD about competitors infringing on patents, rather than doing anything, but I have to believe that would change if they ever felt they were losing.
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
Asking, you mean.
This has absolutely no bearing on whether or not Microsoft will be allowed to continue shipping Word.
i4i is entirely within their right not to license the patent to Microsoft, even if/after Microsoft pays the fines and damages.
Well, the term lawyers use isn't "patent troll" but NPE (non-practicing entity).
Under that term, i4i is, in fact, a practicing entity. That is to say, i4i makes an actual product using something like custom XML. No, i4i does not make a word processor, but Microsoft hasn't been barred from selling MS Word, only from incorporating custom XML into it. So the injunction only exists to prevent Microsoft from cannibalizing i4i's product.
Now, I do think their patent is a bit obvious and I don't like software patents in general. But if Microsoft had any sense, they would do an about-face and recant their amicus brief on Bilski, asking the Supreme Court to strike down all software patents, reducing their potential legal liability tremendously. Of course, I know they won't do that. And I don't know what deadlines are involved, so it's possible that it's too late for them to do that. But they might not be in this mess if they had seen the light and lobbied against software patents a long time ago.
And on a side note, I can't believe that there are Microsoft "partners" in this day and age who don't expect to get screwed. I wouldn't have done business with them to begin with. I can't name a single partner they haven't screwed over when given the incentive.
...Should they ever become a multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporate behemoth we will revisit the situation.
You mean like Sun, and soon Oracle?
Just because a product is free doesn't mean the company responsible isn't loaded to the gills with $billions.
Oracle doesn't have as many $billions as Microsoft has, sure, but they still have $billions. That Open Office is open makes it a choice target if it does, in fact, infringe on any patents.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
> and they're telling the Supreme Court to apply the
> Bilski ruling narrowly, so that it doesn't
> invalidate patents like theirs
Microsoft is in a bit of a bind here. Even raising Bilski arguments puts their patent in question as well as providing ammunition for any future challenges of Microsoft patents.
Their best bet is to pretend they never heard of Bilski and find other grounds for their challenge, or just license i4i's technology to preserve their own claims.
A pox on both their houses.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Actually no, I meant holding enough of the market to be worth billions. What happens if they put a cease and desist on Oracle? Nothing, oracle doesn't ship it anymore (to my knowledge).
Maybe they win a one time judgement but that's not their current strategy with MS. Their current strategy is to stop the shipments and try to force negotiations for patent license fees.
all the shills here still trying to call I4i a patent troll. It's been proven conclusively that they do not fit the definition, and they have said their patent isn't violated by ODF, yet the same old lies just keep on coming.
I can't believe the lack of ethics and outright lying that goes on here. I'd have to hide my head in shame if I were caught in the lies being told here. Yet, here are shills still trumpeting their crap.
It's no wonder the US is going down the tubes and our society is collapsing as this type of behavior is unsustainable in any society. However, there is a fairly large segment of our population that just doesn't care or aren't smart enough to realize what their actions cause. A short term dollar for a very large long-term loss is a lousy trade.
For a few bucks they will shit in their own back yard and destroy their own society. IMO, that makes them dumber than any dog I've ever owned. At least none of my dogs would ever shit in their own back yard.
You say this is harsh? Go read about how Rome's, and every other major civilization's, society crumbled and you'll see the same exact types of behavior. We are on the road to repeating their failures if things don't change.
Good as I use OpenOffice, and there isn't anything that is any good other than OpenOffice on Linux side that I know of for starving students.
What I just completely fail to understand about this patent (i4i's patent I mean) is the words "custom XML". I keep seeing this term "custom XML" as part of its claims. But XML stands for the eXtensible Markup Language. It was designed to be customised. I don't understand,
What leap of logic am I missing here? (Having, obviously, not read the patent.)
There's no money in enforcing a patent against Open Office, so we won't sue you. Should you start making a lot of money, we'll get back to you with our updated policy.
Sun does not own Open Office and soon Oracle will continue to not own it.
This piece by Amy Wohl is the only writing on this subject that comes remotely close to explaining what is going on.
In short, i4i's patent only covers some specific use of XML that is only widely used in the medical field. Microsoft is violating that particular patent.
i4i is apparently not claiming that they own a patent against all of XML or anything.
Actually, the patent does no such thing. The i4i patent describes an algorithm to separate the tags and plaintext of a markup-language document into two separate files, where the locations of the tags are defined by the character position at which they would have appeared in the original, embedded-tag document.
i4i claims to have patented the concept of storing a document's raw data and formatting data separately, rather than inline. Given that Microsoft Word's Custom XML stores its markup inline, I hardly see how i4i's patent applies here.
Also, on a *totally* unrelated topic, guess who, in 2000, won a multimillion dollar contract to provide XML authoring software to the US Patent office? i4i. http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/473021
1.Serialize ODF into JSON instead of XML
2.Laugh at both "office documents serialized into xml" patent trolls
3.profit
> This has absolutely no bearing on whether or not Microsoft will be allowed to continue shipping Word.
The permanent injunction itself explicitly allows Microsoft to continue shipping Word. All they have to do is remove the custom XML feature. It looks like they changed my link to the Slashdot story about it, and I don't blame them, but the original linked to the Groklaw story on the permanent injunction and you can read the terms of it here.
The judge's order spells out how they're allowed to deal with documents containing custom XML in future Word versions. They're *only* forbidden to ship current, infringing versions. They do NOT have to license the patent unless they believe that they need to keep the feature. Even if it was completely impossible to remove for some reason, the absolute worst they could possibly have to do is to revert their source control to the version of Word before they added the feature, then rebuild from there.
The injunction is nowhere near as bad as it appears to be in the press. I thought my original summary made clear exactly what the terms of the injunction were, but they appear to have trimmed that part, too. I remember quoting a fair bit of the judge's order which would have made things a lot clearer.
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
i4i's patent is here. customXML is just the name of the infringing feature in Microsoft Word, which is why it's referenced as such in the judgment. It's part of the OOXML specification, as well (not that anyone but Microsoft uses that).
In other words, 'customXML' is just a name for a particular way of using XML. It does NOT mean that every way of customizing XML has been patented (though I'm sure there are people trying to do that...).
In a related note, I wish that people would stop saying that Microsoft can't sell Word. They can sell Word. They just have to remove the custom XML feature from it first. The permanent injunction even spells out how to go about removing the feature.
Incidentally, this is why the patent termination clause in Microsoft's OOXML patent license is evil. If Microsoft clones the features of a small company's patented software program for manipulating Office files, like they did in this case, all they would have to do is add it to the subset of OOXML covered by the patent promise and hey presto: if the company sues Microsoft, then Microsoft can countersue to terminate their ability to use OOXML, effectively destroying them. Meanwhile, competitors to Microsoft don't benefit from this, since Microsoft doesn't include anything really innovative in their patent promise.
Basically, it's a very one-sided deal - it lets Microsoft copy and extinguish the competition with impuny, like in this case, while still letting them use the patent system to stop anyone else from doing the same thing. (The same is true of the .Net equivalent.)
it's one of two things, either i4i is holding off suing them since the windfall from MS, or they think OpenOffice doesn't have the cash to make the extortion worthwhile.
Pax Vobiscum
And workers in Sun can be sued as Sun employees because they are officially working on OOo as Sun employees.
Thereby making Sun's (/Oracle's) money available.
Nope, the reason why ODF is not being sued is because... wait for it... it doesn't infringe!
Yes, I know that is strange for you, that someone can make software that *doesn't* infringe a software patent, but it *can* happen...
I don't think the supreme court likes being told what to do by corporations.
It has been suggested in various writings that the newly issued Microsoft patent on an XML-based document would somehow resolve Microsoft's woes against i4i. This is most unlikely. A patent grants only rights to exclude others from practicing a claimed invention, and creates no right at all to practice the claimed invention. It is quite possible to obtain a patent governing a novel and unobvious variation of an existing patented technology. While the second patent would grant its owner the right to exclude people (including the first patent owner) from practicing the variation, it would grant no right to practice the variation if the variation also infringed the first patent.
Of course, it may be the case that the first company may want to practice the variation as well, in which case a cross-licensing deal might be worked out. But the issuing of a new patent on related technology does not, itself, help Microsoft out of its box unless the new technology does not infringe the i4i patent.