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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.
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.
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.
It would be a lot funnier if it were Apple. I hate Microsoft but it seems like almost every time they're in court, I end up on their side.
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.
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.
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.
I think it would even more funny and ironic if it were "big patent" IBM (or as fake steve jobs calls em: "The Original Borg").
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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.
I think you may be overreacting a bit. Whether the patent is valid or not (an appellate decision might prove that it is not), it certainly isn't as broad in scope as you are suggesting. Microsoft may end up having to remove some infrequently used functionality from Word, but the software industry as we know it is not going to come to an end because of this injunction.
Before characterizing the courts as completely clueless, you might want to go through the court's memorandum opinion and order (PACER registration required, but no cost for this document) denying Microsoft's motion for judgment as a matter of law. It is a detailed memorandum (65 pages, double-spaced, 12-pt font) that gives quite a bit of detail as to why the judge decided to uphold the jury's verdict. Go through it and decide for yourself whether the evidence and arguments presented by Microsoft were so convincing that no reasonably jury would have found for i4i.
Cute, but seriously, take a closer look at what the real issues are in this case. If you don't try to understand the facts that drive a particular case, your arguments regarding the law and the way courts apply it will sound more like pseudoscience than science. Good science is based on facts. Good legal arguments are based on facts too.
Yeah, that's how The Adventures of Superman radio show undermined the Klan:
http://www.ferris.edu/JIMCROW/question/july09/
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Only if you find the decay of human civilizations funny. No one is immune to this nonsense and in the end innovation grinds to a halt and everything goes backwards until the current IP laws are replaced with something saner and more sustainable. In the meantime expect to see less progress on everything from things that make your life more convenient to medical technology your life may depend on.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
> 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.
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.)
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.
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
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.)