US Court Tells Microsoft To Stop Selling Word 403
oranghutan writes "A judge in a Texas court has given Microsoft 60 days to comply with an order to stop selling Word products in their existing state as the result of a patent infringement suit filed by i4i. According to the injunction, Microsoft is forbidden from selling Word products that let people create XML documents, which both the 2003 and 2007 versions let you do. Michael Cherry, an analyst quoted in the article, said, 'It's going to take a long time for this kind of thing to get sorted out.' Few believe the injunction will actually stop Word from being sold because there are ways of working around it. In early 2009, a jury in the Texas court ordered Microsoft to pay i4i $200 million for infringing on the patent. ZDNet has a look at the patent itself, saying it 'sounds a bit generic.'"
Re:Live by sword... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Live by sword... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, they just use FUD and the threat of patents to try to scare people away from using Linux.
Re:Does that mean... (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe not. Office 2000 Word files use XML [devx.com]:
Whether or not that's within scope is unclear.
Re:Live by sword... (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft has been pro-software-patent since the mid 1990s...
Contact i4i (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does that mean... (Score:2, Informative)
Google gives me this [pschmid.net].
I'm getting to like the new ribbons, but sometimes the location of a function seems a tad obscure....
I'm sad you had to hear it this way (Score:1, Informative)
I actually like Open Office more then Office 2007, it doesn't have that rotten ribbon that makes it a pain in the backside to find things.
Preview the Office 2007 Ribbon-Like UI Floated For OpenOffice.Org [slashdot.org]
Re:Live by sword... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Live by sword... (Score:5, Informative)
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then they have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can. "
taken from the 1991 memo at http://www.std.com/obi/Bill.Gates/Challenges.and.Strategy [std.com]
Gates knows software patents are bad for the industry, but Microsoft still lobbys for software patent laws in many countries. They will win in the EU soon...
Re:Contact i4i (Score:2, Informative)
Actually having read the patent (Score:5, Informative)
At first I thought this was BS... the way they're describing this patent (in the articles about it) makes it sound like i4i's patent basically applies to any markup language (XML, SGML, HTML, etc). It does not. What they have a patent on is using a map to locate the tags, so that tags don't interfere with document content. If MS is doing this, it isn't part of standard XML, AFAIK.
Let me say it again: This patent isn't about XML, SGML, CSS, etc. It's pretty specific, and, if Microsoft is actually violating it, it's because of what they're doing differently, not because they're using XML.
All that said, IANAL, so there may well be something important I missed.
Re:Live by sword... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:this makes no sense (Score:2, Informative)
To be clear: not just any HTML editor. WYSIWYG editors that:
So for instance, editors that display what is architecturally the title of the document, allow you to right click, and change form elements.
Not a "Texas Court", a US Court (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Actually having read the patent (Score:5, Informative)
What do you mean by a "map" - if you mean a "map" as in "a data structure used to locate the XML tags" then that describes most every XML DOM implementation. When the XML is loaded and parsed, the tags are placed into what I would prefer to call an "index" that helps identify the location of the tags and the structure of the document. XPATH implementations use this heavily.
If I misunderstood, could you reply with a clarification? Sorry, I'm at work and I don't have time to read the patent myself right now.
Lotus Notes has done this for years (Score:5, Informative)
From the patent abstract:
"A system and method for seperate manipulation of the archicture and content of a document particularly for data representation and transformations. The systems for use by the computer software developers removes the dependency on the document encoding technology. A map of metacodes found in the document is produced an provided and stored seperately from the document. The map indicates the locatino and addresses of metacodes in the document. The system allows of multiple views of the same content, the ability to work solely on structure and solely on content storage efficieny of multiple versions and efficiency of operation."
Re:Does that mean... (Score:3, Informative)
XML good. "custom" XML, like that Microsoft proposed under OOXML is bad. It the use (basically) of a data table within the document that maps out the tags within the file. XML itself does not use this. M$ was the only company pushing for it's use. Apparently, they forgot to patent it
Re:Patent withdrawn? (Score:4, Informative)
looks like a typo you made in the patent number. Check out http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5787449.html [freepatentsonline.com] for the full text.
Re:"sounds a bit generic" (Score:5, Informative)
The patent office isn't competent to evaluate this kind of patent (which makes me wonder if they're competent about any others). There's at least two (now expired) patents on LZW compression, with Unisys's being the later of the two. There's a multiplicity of patents which cover RLE or null suppression. Change your terminology a little, and you can get a new patent on the same thing.
In this case, it appears the troll has used the term "metacode" to indicate a formatting code, whereas other patents use other terms. New term = new patent.
Furthermore, the patent isn't on saving a word processing document as an XML file. It's a number of claims around the idea of, instead of storing the "metacodes" inline with the document, storing the raw text of the document and a separate table (their "metacode map") indicating where the "metacodes" would be. Once you've got that idea (which is not at all new), the ways of manipulating it are pretty much standard stuff any decent CS student could figure out. The claims include (but aren't limited to) creating that "metacode map" from the original document with inline "metacodes", and applying the "metacode map" to the raw text to create the document with inline "metacodes".
So if Slashcode takes this message with inline formatting codes, and at any point converts it into pure text and stores the formatting codes separately as a set of pointers into the raw text, Slashdot has violated the patent. Ridiculous.
Re:"sounds a bit generic" (Score:3, Informative)
So if Slashcode takes this message with inline formatting codes, and at any point converts it into pure text and stores the formatting codes separately as a set of pointers into the raw text, Slashdot has violated the patent. Ridiculous.
That's what Apple's TextEdit or whatever it was called then did in the late 80's, probably since 1986 or 1987. The text was stored in the data fork of a file, and the complete formatting information was stored as a 'styl' resource in the data fork.
Re:Live by sword... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Live by sword... (Score:3, Informative)
> Microsoft's many things, but they're never a patent troll
Maybe you forgot.
MS claiming linux violates 235 patents [cnn.com] without telling which ones, is not patent trolling? It's a textbook example, like the mentioned FAT quarrel with tomtom.
Besides, for the crybabies who keep repeating the "Slashdot hates microsoft" story. Look at the rating parent earned.
Re:"sounds a bit generic" (Score:1, Informative)
I don't think you presently can patent music lyrics, movie scripts or cooking recipes.
There was a talk at Siggraph in 2007 about how it might be possible to patent a script since there's nothing legally preventing it; but it might be hard to prove its uniqueness.
You can (it happens automatically, in fact) copyright the lyrics to a song and the text of a book, but copyrights and patents are far from the same thing.
Good or bad? (Score:3, Informative)
This ruling will be bad for "bidnis".
Re:Live by sword... (Score:3, Informative)
"Having huge patent exchanges was his quick way to secure as much of his company's IP from being pillaged by patent trolls"
I don't think a "patent troll" is what you think it is.
When you produce real goods you want to protect your IP through patents mainly to avoid competing companies to get your innovations without the expensive R+D process or to block your product line. These are defensive patents; they might be ludicrous but they are still defensive (if you try to sue me for violating your patent X on my products -that's the key point, I'll counterattack with my patent Y your products violate, so we better settle). On top of this, big corps use them to rise the barrier for new competitors to enter the playground (as soon as they start to look as a menace they can bury them with their own patent portfolio and the newcomers won't be able to counterattack since they haven't had time to develop their own defensive one). That's why big corps lobyied for current stupid patent system, so they could be granted hugh amounts of patents yearly without out of proportion R+D expenditures.
On the other hand, a patent troll does not produce anything except patents themselves, thus being immune to this kind of counterattack (...I'll counterattack with my patent Y your products violate... wait a minute! what products?). As big corps are starting to realize collecting massive amounts of defensive patents won't protect them from patent trolls; a sane patent system would do (is really that patent non-trivial, innovative, detailed and at least a prototype already produced?). Of course those very big corps were lobbying for about fifty years just to make impossible for a sane patent system to exist so to some extent those patent trolls are the Nemesis for a kind of poetical justice.
sounds a bit familiar (Score:1, Informative)
How is this any different from what Nisus Writer did in 1989? Nisus also stored the plaintext first and the formatting codes last (albeit in the resource fork).
If another software vendor had been doing it for 10 years at the time of the patent, shouldn't the patent be invalidated on the grounds of prior art?
Re:Live by sword... (Score:3, Informative)
Nope. So many people think like you seem to: That "patent troll" means "somebody doing something with patents that I don't like." That's not at all what it is.
Patent trolls are companies who exist to do nothing but create patents. These companies never produce anything, they just hope to either force licensing fees from people who are actually creating or, if that company is particularly rich, they wait around for the product in question to become popular, sue them for huge damages and then force licensing fees going forward.
As somebody else said, Microsoft's claims about linux violating its patents is excellent FUD--whether it turns out to be true or not--but they're not patent trolling. Not even close.
He's rated a four and you're rated a five, as of this writing. If we insist on drawing something from that I'd say it goes more to prove the point than disprove it. Though in the interest of, you know, logic and reasonableness instead of red herrings, I feel obligated to point out that "Slashdot hates microsoft[sic]" is in no way disproven by a post getting modded up.
Re:Does that mean... (Score:2, Informative)