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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."
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.
I think it's funny. Microsoft steps right into a landmines of patents, and problems and complications seem to go off at every turn. Ironic? A little bit. Come on, it's a little funny.
The submitted article cites the patent owner saying it doesn't apply to ODF. Why would I care what someone who says about himself, "I am not a lawyer, and specifically not a patent lawyer. I have never spent a lot of time on learning about the intricacies of patent law" has to say on the matter at this point? In fact, why would I care even what experienced patent lawyers have to say now? Hasn't it been definitively settled by i4i's statement?
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.
The submitted article cites the patent owner saying it doesn't apply to ODF. Why would I care what someone who says about himself, "I am not a lawyer, and specifically not a patent lawyer. I have never spent a lot of time on learning about the intricacies of patent law" has to say on the matter at this point? In fact, why would I care even what experienced patent lawyers have to say now? Hasn't it been definitively settled by i4i's statement?
What hasn't been settled by i4i's statement is the (IMO false) claim that the MS patent affects ODF more than the i4i patent does.
Yup. I think it's because the patent system is inherently anti-consumer. Whether MS itself is pro- or anti-consumer doesn't seem to matter, every time they get in patent trouble it's the consumer who loses out, and usually over something that shouldn't really be patentable at all. Remember that viewing a spreadsheet as a database table thing? Where somehow it was patentable that one thing whose most obvious representation is a grid be mappable to something else whose most obvious representation is a grid. Net result: consumer lost a feature for no technical reason whatsoever. Anyway, if a system makes software worse, as a programmer and a user I think that system needs to be abolished.
And the extra problem with such patent litigation is the broadness of the patents. The patents are so broad, they could easily apply to other (free) software as well, or they might unless Sun never adds certain features to OOo - how is that still free software? How can there be? Even if patent owners say they'll never sue over the patent, there's no guarantee that they won't, and certainly no guarantee they won't sue derivative software. And even so, I think it's unfair that a private entity could tell companies A, B and C to go and compete in the marketplace while withholding the patent licence from D, E, and F. And not just unfair to those companies (or rather the people making a living working for them, I know of course that companies don't have feelings) but it's also bad for the consumer as it reduces healthy competition.
And at a risk of swerving off-topic, I think that MS getting sued is bad for the consumer goes beyond the patent system. It always ends up with lawyers and judges demanding changes in software, which invariable cripples it, or a huge fine which ends up on the plate of the consumer. Saying that the consumer can choose something else is a) still not very realistic at the moment and b) even though I'm a huge free software fan I think it sounds like abuse of the legal system. On the whole I think I'd rather have a sound legal system, free software will win in the long run anyway.
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.)
The application of patents to software isn't enshrined in legislation, but instead was created by a series of court decisions and USPTO decisions.
Hence, the court has just as much power to strike down the beast as they did in creating it. Legislation would remove all ambiguity, where the supreme court is more likely to give as narrow an opinion as they can.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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.
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
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.)