Microsoft Word Patent Case Going To Supreme Court

jfruhlinger writes "Microsoft may have had to change Word after being found guilty of violating a Canadian company's patents, but it's still resisting paying for damages — and is taking the fight to the US Supreme Court. If you can't stand either MS or patents, who do you root for here?"

Comments

Re:MS is in the wrong here.

[euroq]

OK, I looked at the actual claims of the patent. What I4I has basically done is patented XML, or at least the use of XML.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=y8UkAAAAEBAJ&printsec=description&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION It is an object of the present invention to provide an improved method of encoding a document It is a further object of the present invention to provide an improved system of encoding a document. Thus, in sharp contrast to the prior art the present invention is based on the practice of separating encoding conventions from the content of a document. The invention does not use embedded metacoding to differentiate the content of the document, but rather, the metacodes of the document are separated from the content and held in distinct storage in a structure called a metacode map. whereas document content is held in a mapped content area. Raw content is an extreme example of mapped content wherein the latter is totally unstructured and has no embedded metacodes in the data stream.

What they have done is taken the prior existing technology XML, and patented using it in a document to describe how some text is bold, or what the document title is. Fuck that, that is the most obvious use of XML, it's a textbook example of XML. These guys would never make $290 million off of their "invention" which they didn't invent.

Also, I don't believe the fact that the courts didn't invalidate the software patent indicates, by any stretch of the means, that the patent should be a valid patent. That's why everyone here generally doesn't hate patents, they just hate software patents. People patent obvious things and our courts buy it. Regardless of where you stand on the matter of if it hurts the big guy or the little guy, it is an incredible injustice to be able to patent obvious things, which many software patents actually are.