Corel Sued For Software Patent Infringement

petchema writes "Corel is been sued by Advanced Software for software patent infringement. The contention feature is the side-by-side file comparison found in Wordperfect. " Yeah because nobody did that before. Update: 07/07 02:50 by CT : originally this story linked through to advancedsw.com- this company is in Colorado and has nothing to do with the Advanced Software from California that was doin' the suin'. Sorry about the confusion.

Comments

X Consortium Sues World for Patent Infringement

[Signal 11]

Washington,DC -- Legal experts today commended a move by the Xerox to sue the computer industry for flagrant violation of it's patent on "windows". A spokesman for Xerox stated that "We invented the basic GUI that almost all modern computers are based on." Legal experts applauded the move, and some say this could prove a serious threat to the dominant Microsoft corporation.

Slashdot has also reported being sued by CNN news, for violation of it's proprietary look and feel interface to daily news. "Slashdot has intentionally ripped off the idea of using html code to distribute news to the masses, and we will not stand by while they continue to do this."



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Read the patent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please see the original and reissued patents, on the IBM patent server. The original patent was filed in 1986, which may or may not affect prior art arguments.

These patents are not for the idea of displaying two drafts of a document side-by-side. They cover specific algorithms and methods for detecting which blocks are different between two documents, and matching up corresponding blocks between two versions of a document.

This is, as far as I can tell, sufficiently different from the working of UNIX diff that diff wouldn't constitute prior art. I don't have any experience with the offending Corel feature, so I really can't say whether it might infringe on this patent.

It's still not a very impressive patent, and I as sickened by software patents as any coder, but please try to do a little research before spreading misinformation like this (or reacting to it).

The technical details of the patent are essentially that the system uses a hash algorithm on all the lines in the documents and finds hashes which are the same in both documents, which it uses as "anchorpoints" to correlate the two texts.

It then seems to do some grouping of changed lines into words or sentences. The patent also refers to methods for displaying or printing the documents side-by-side with indicators of changes, insertions, deletions, etc.