Slashdot Mirror
Court Allows Microsoft To Sell Word During Appeal
An anonymous reader sends along this update to the ongoing patent battle between Microsoft and i4i involving XML formatting in Word.
"Microsoft's motion to stay an injunction has been granted; the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has allowed the company to keep selling Word as it appeals a patent ruling from last month. The injunction had an effective date of October 10, but the motion to stay blocks the injunction until the appeal process is complete. If upheld, the injunction wouldn't stop existing users from using Word, but it could prevent the software giant from selling Word 2003 or Word 2007, the most common versions of Word currently on the market, and would require the company to significantly tweak Word 2010, which is slated for the first half of next year. The victory is a small one for Microsoft; the company still has the whole appeals process to go through. 'We are happy with the result and look forward to presenting our arguments on the main issues on September 23,' a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. 'Microsoft's scare tactics about the consequences of the injunction cannot shield it from the imminent review of the case by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal on the September 23 appeal,' said i4i chairman Loudon Owen in response to the court's decision."
They are reaping what they sowed. It doesn't make the patent troll any less despicable though.
How many times does this need to be pointed out? i4i is not a patent troll. That doesn't mean they're cute and cuddly panda bears, but they aren't a patent troll, which is defined as suing over patents without having an actual product (or in other words, suing over patents is a patent troll's business model, not building things). i4i does have an actual product, and they claim that Microsoft is competing against their product; after convincing a judge of that, they got the injunction.
i4i does have an actual product, and they claim that Microsoft is competing against their product; after convincing a judge of that, they got the injunction.
I thought the case revolved around Microsoft stealing their product, not competing against it. That Microsoft took their product and bundled their own rather-similar-indeed implementation directly into Word, and that the patent is the only thing i4i has that they can sue MS over. But yes, to re-iterate i4i is not, in any shape or form, a patent troll and this is one case where the patent system is actually working as intended!
Microsoft was very naughty and deserves to sit on the 'do not collect $200 per copy' step.
Way to paint Microsoft as the victim here.
According to GrokLaw, this is what happened:
Whether or not the patent should have been granted is not the issue at this point. It was.
The plaintiff (i4i) had a successful add-on for MS Word that it was selling. In 2003, Microsoft added the same functionality to Word. Microsoft then refused all attempts on i4i's part to license the functionality.
The license fees requested were on the order of $25M. It was Microsoft's repeated refusal to negotiate that resulted in not only a large award, but punitive damages as well.
They (Microsoft) were found liable for willful infringement, so yes, they did steal the patented method.
The weird thing here is that this is actually a case of a patent working the way that patents are supposed to work:
Company A comes up with a reasonably unique and functional solution to a broad problem, patents it and starts selling it. They take it to mega-corp B who has a problem that can be easily solved with company A's product, and mega-corp B -- rather than negotiate with company A, simply steals their design, and incorporates it into their product in the expectation that this will be sufficient to run company A into the ground before any litigation can come to fruition.
The thing to note here, is that I4I's patent isn't just for an idea, it's actually for a real product and an apparently graceful solution to what had previously been an intractible problem.
The XML implementation is simply a specific implementation of their patent, but -- once you have XML -- it's not the only XML solution or even (for many people) the best XML solution.
It is starting to look like they didn't patent the general idea of adding meta-data to a file. They patented a specific way of organizing that meta-data to produce a specific result.
In the broader context of software patents being a bad idea, I would be inclined to classify this as an example of 'good case, bad law'. It is somewhat gratifying to see software patents put to a good use, for once.