Microsoft Ordered To Pay $290M, Stop Selling Word

Cytalk and other readers tipped us to Microsoft's loss in a US appeals court, in a patent case brought by Canadian company i4i. Microsoft must now pay $290M and either stop selling Word (and probably Office) by January 11, or somehow work around the patent by that date. A Seattle PI blog reports that Redmond has a few options left: "In a statement, Microsoft said it was working hard to comply with the injunction. The company also said it is considering further legal options, including possible requests for a new hearing or a writ of certiorari from the US Supreme Court." Update: 12/22 20:47 GMT by KD : Tim Bray has up a blog post explaining why it would be no great loss if Microsoft dropped the "custom XML" feature in dispute.
Update: 12/22 23:04 GMT by KD : Reader adeelarshad82 pointed out a statement released by Microsoft earlier today, which says in part: "We expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date. In addition, the beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are available now for downloading, do not contain the technology covered by the injunction."

Comments

$500 instead of $90 for MS Word?

[Greg Hullender]

I thought it odd that they calculated the damages on the assumption that, had Microsoft paid royalties on the patent, they'd have pushed the price of MS Word from $90 to $500 with no loss of sales. It seems to me that if the traffic would support that price, Microsoft would already have been charging it!

--Greg

Re:Say goodbye for XML

[Anonymous Coward]

Say goodbye for XML?! Why? Can't XML speak for itself?

Your post is a load of horseshit and furthers my fears that you're a Microsoft shill (your bing posts are borderline brilliant).

This is stupid because Microsoft was moving here to open XML standards from their propriety .doc format. It's a common thing to blame MS for their locked in, own formats since Open Office and others couldn't open them.

What's your point? That since they're being attacked by a patent troll I should forgive them for everything fucking stupid and backward they've done?

i4i's patent is basically XML (yes it really is, read the patent claims [uspto.gov]).

Your expertise as a patent examiner is priceless to me. As is your extreme simplification of something you know nothing about.

Re:Say goodbye for XML

[toejam13]

Briefly reading over the patent in question, I'm curious how this patient was granted given that it resembles IBM's Generalized Markup Language (GML) from the 1960s and the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) standardized by the ISO in 1986.

Hear that sound?

[MosesJones]

Its the sound of the patent system beginning to crash down. RIght now there are two choices

1) Take the fundamentally broken US system and roll it out across the world
2) Take the rest of the worlds approach that software can't be patented and roll it out to the UK

The scary thing is that even with judgements like this and the patent trolls out there we are actually seeing the likes of Microsoft push for option 1.

Patents will be the death of innovation if the system continues in this way, particularly if the US judgements are assessed at insane levels of cost. If Microsoft had known about this patent when starting the development they'd have bought the company for less than this judgement.

Re:Obvious solution

[reebmmm]

Well, on the one hand, the patent gives i4i the right to exclude others from practicing the claimed invention. The court has already told MS that Word is infringing, therefore selling Word would violate the patent rights. MS could simply removing the infringing feature and it could continue selling Word. MS is in control of this aspect.

On the other hand, at the moment, i4i has very little incentive to offer MS any sort of license. i4i won at the lower court and on appeal. Plus, I believe the story goes that they approached MS and MS sent them away and then went ahead and implemented it anyway. They will be able to demand infringement-sized royalties the closer it gets to January 11.

Re:Say goodbye for XML

[gstoddart]

In the meantime, a company which was issued a patent in 1998 for the idea of maintaining a document's format in a separate file

But, what's astounding to me, is in 1995 I was using SGML as a method of separating the document content from its layout. The layout wasn't kept in a separate file, but there were mechanisms to apply publishing layout to SGML based on rules. That was the whole point of SGML and its predecessor GML.

Heck, in 1995 Arbor Text had an SGML editor which could apply formatting to SGML documents for the purposes of publishing, and the company I worked for was helping people to install SGML editing and layout systems.

I'm not 100% convinced that these actually represent novel claims. They may not have been described in terms of XML, but the state of the art with SGML sure as hell was doing the whole "maintaining a document's format in a separate file" before this.

Can anyone who understands this a little more identify what specifically is required to infringe on this patent?

Cheers

Re:Say goodbye for XML

[St.Creed]

In 1995 I designed and built (most of) the software for the following CD-ROM:
"Berg, J. van den, Duijfjes-Vellekoop, G.G.J., Kunenborg, R. & Tenback, R. (1995). Marburger Index Datenbank, ein Wegweiser zur Kunst in Deutschland (CD-ROM). Munchen: K.G. Saur Verlag. " (*)

It included several internal parsers, including one for a HTML-like language that separated the content of the database from the on-screen expression. Basically, my own miniature implementation of Mozilla.
It was sold in musea throughout Germany.

I guess that should count as prior art. I'm pretty sure we could dig up the sourcecode if asked nicely.

(*) As an aside, I'm still pretty proud of that software. It runs like a charm on anything from windows 3.11 to Vista, will stay stable even with less than 1 KB of free memory (windows crashes before this program does) and we never had to do a bugfix. Written in around 20000 lines of C++. Chalk one up for rigorously applying and checking invariants and pre- and postconditions.

Re:Say goodbye for XML

[rtfa-troll]

The feature i4i provided was the ability to use MS Word as a general XML editor by embedding xml codes in the word document. It did this in a special way which was, according to the court, copied by MS Word's Custom XML feature. The grandparent is kind of correct; there's no good reason for Custom XML to be in Microsoft's OOXML so whilst it is a feature of OOXML it's doesn't really have much to do with the OOXML format in general, just one feature of that format used only by MS Word.

(BTW checking this took a huge effort, and big searching and I'm still not sure it's the whole truth. It's astounding how much of the media, both "main stream" and alternative/blog is covering this whilst trying to pretend that i4i never did anything useful at all.)