Slashdot Mirror
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?"
So Canadian Court says pay money, so you go above them to the US Supreme Court, aka, Court of the World?
The Company and its people are Canadian, but i4i came to the US to sue Microsoft in the US District court of Eastern Texas.
Note, this is one of those cases of true alleged evil.
i4i is not a patent troll. They developed software. They showed Microsoft the software, in the hopes of Microsoft licensing it.
Microsoft reviewed the technology, apparently decided to not license it / not incorporate the technology.
The next version of Word included Microsoft's own copycat implementation of exactly the technology. And came to the market competing against i4i's product instead of properly licensing i4i's product.
IOW, this is not a bunk "obvious method" software patent. This is exactly the type of things patents are designed to prevent.
Wholesale stealing of a significant invention.
And the allegation of willful infringement appeared to be a reasonable allegation for i4i to make.
I normally go against software patents, but only because often the things that are patented are not inventions, or attempts are made to apply the patent to things simpler or more fundamental than the invention.
In this case, however, I would not object to i4i enforcing this patent and that succeeding
This used to be true. Now Microsoft has been threatening people with patent litigation. If fact, they took the outstanding step of suing Motorola - several times!
Of course this is neither here nor there on the evilness issue. That's a story that has no beginning and no end, its purity no degree.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm sure it has been said in other comments by now, but just in case. Let us not forget that the Canadian company in question actually DID have a product related to the patent. They DID work with Microsoft. Microsoft stopped dealing with them and then continued to use the patented technology knowingly without license. THIS is why the court of appeals UPHELD the court findings. MS still doesn't want to pay, so they are taking all the legal approaches available to them to avoid paying. The Canadian company (IMI) in this particular case is NOT a patent troll. In fact they are actually using the patent system the way it was intended - to stop the big boys from destroying the business of the little players. So, you'll excuse me if I root for IMI in this case. MS is not innocent here - the courts even said so. BUT, perhaps if MS is made to play by the same rules they want competitors to play by, perhaps they'll realize the current system is borked and increase their efforts to help change the system. We'll ignore for now MS's role in creating the current cluster-f#$@ system that is in place. Disclaimer - I'm a Canadian. But I don't care where the company came from. MS bullied the company pretty much out of business by stealing their tech, and now doesn't want to pay the piper for their actions. I don't have any respect for anybody that plays that way.
This patent is certainly less trivial than most, but like most things in computer technology it is not much of an "invention". The basic idea here is content / representation separation in document generation, something that goes back to the first automated business information systems. The idea of sticking a section like this in the middle of another document is about as exotic as the notion of include files and macros, which also go back decades prior.
In the early 1990s the idea of active content and embedded objects was all the rage. In fact Microsoft has been sued on those grounds before, by someone else who pulled out an idea that was "in the air" at the time. Not because it was an "invention", but because it was commercially practical.
Virtually every idea in computer science has been thought of decades prior, and the only reason long expired patents aren't already held on them is because the level of computing power didn't make them commercially practical at the time. These folks appear to have an excellent implementation of inline xml expansion, but it hardly ranks as an "invention" of the sort that no one would independently come up with for years to come.
And that is one of the basic problems with the patent system - give a company a twenty year monopoly on something that is at best a couple years advance on the prior art. The patent system is made for fields that experience a basic technological changeover about once a century, not fields that do that every ten years or so.
That is why the claim that they "ripped off our technology" has about as much credibility as the claim "I played a heretofore unknown chord on the piano". A minor twist on something bouncing around in the heads of computer scientists for decades prior at best.