Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US [LWN.net]

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 14:00 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (3 responses)

Reading the patent (!), it doesn't bear much resemblance to .docx to me at all - in fact, it looks a lot more like the string-interning stuff that .xlsx does. Oh well.

If it affects OOXML, it almost certainly affects ODF. Doubtless "i4i" (how appropriate, eh?) have no product and are only going after the "big guns", although it would be quite worrying if they can extend their injunction over Word when they discover it has native .odt support too....

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 19:15 UTC (Wed) by gouyou (guest, #30290) [Link] (1 responses)

Doubtless "i4i" (how appropriate, eh?) have no product

Actually they have a product.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 13, 2009 5:11 UTC (Thu) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

They have a product based on *Word*?

Wow, seriously "down the rabbithole" time...

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 14, 2009 0:17 UTC (Fri) by richardfish (guest, #20657) [Link]

As I understand the lawsuit, i4i took offense to the custom XML feature of word that allows users to define a custom schema and attach it to a document, and then markup the content based on the schema. That seems match some functionality that i4i sells with its products.

It doesn't seem to have anything to do with storing documents in XML, or the OOXML/ODF specs. OpenOffice.org isn't affected because it doesn't support adding custom markup to a document.

I'm very surprised at the damage award. I have trouble believing that "custom XML" is used by enough office users to affect i4i sales, much less to justify damages of nearly $300 million!

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 12, 2009 14:02 UTC (Wed) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link] (14 responses)

From their perspective, I can certainly understand the pride. They now own one of the most valuable legal weapons on the planet: A patent that can shut down Microsoft's Office business. The patent is now literally worth however much Office is worth to Microsoft. This is basically a hostage/ransom situation.

Of course Microsoft has the resources to fight this endlessly in the courts - the usual tactic against patent trolls, to make it not worth their while. But to do so while not being able to sell Office isn't an option. All I can see happening here is either Microsoft somehow manages to win an appeal in the next 60 days, or the owners of this patent become immensely, ridiculously wealthy on day 60.

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 12, 2009 14:37 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (13 responses)

That was already the appeal, so MS is pretty short of legal options. Working around the patent is one possibility, if that doesn't cause compatibility problems.

I'm not sure what the right analogy is. I thought first that i4i won the patent lottery, but no bystanders get hurt or put at risk in a lottery.

(On swpat.org, I'm documenting i4i v. Microsoft and Microsoft's lost cases)

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 12, 2009 15:09 UTC (Wed) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link]

"That was already the appeal, so MS is pretty short of legal options. Working around the patent is one possibility, if that doesn't cause compatibility problems."

Is it not possible to bring a private criminal prosecution in that country? It seems like this is quite a simple case of fraud, and criminal proceedings should be brought against those responsible. As individuals.

Fraud: Act or course of deception, an intentional concealment, omission, or perversion of truth, to (1) gain unlawful or unfair advantage, (2) induce another to part with some valuable item or surrender a legal right, or (3) inflict injury in some manner.

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 12, 2009 15:13 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (7 responses)

As far as i4i goes they did win. They are going to be very wealthy people because of this.

Everybody else gets f*k'd though. Thanks Congress, Judicial folks, and the Patent Office! Our government at work.

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 12, 2009 16:31 UTC (Wed) by Doogie (guest, #59626) [Link] (6 responses)

Microsoft has also benefited from these same inane patent laws and has done little or nothing to rectify the situation. So I find it hard to have any sympathy for them, or to lay the blame entirely upon the big bad government. Someone had to vote for the people who enacted these laws and someone else had lobby for them.

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 12, 2009 22:04 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (5 responses)

Actually, why not blame the government? Who cares how many people and who voted for it? Does voting suddenly justify bad law? There is no rational argument that says that if X number of people get together and commit crimes that they are not still crimes.

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 12, 2009 22:38 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

This sort of situation is why I am a big fan of limited government.

If you put the government in charge of businesses and whatnot then that leads to corruption. Just because people are inherently corruptable, and government is nothing but a bunch of people. You give businesses a _reason_ to send lobbyists and try to spend money, time, and effort to manipulate the government... then that is just what they'll do. It's human nature.

Take away the task of government to control busines they you eliminate the corrupting influence of business on goverment. It's a very simple mechanism.

Of course you can't eliminate the controls. So you have to keep them as minimal as possible. Keep the controls as minimal as possible and you minimize the risk and negative effects.

That then hopefully puts the risk into the 'managable risk' catagory. That is it's small enough that people can do stuff about it before it gets out of hand.

-----------------------

In this case it's a problem of inactivity and inflexibility of government.

The patent laws existed prior to software, yet somehow they were able to apply to software. The Courts say this is legal, mostly, and it's up to Congress to actually do something about it.

Which they haven't done anything.

*shrug*

---------------------------

It's a tough situation and certainly Microsoft has a portion of the blame.

They should be petitioning the government to help reform software patent law, but instead they are protecting it for their own gain, even though it's literally costing them multi-million dollars every single year.

Yes, they are MORONS and probably deserve it. But it doesn't mean I like seeing patent trolling or companies being victomized by the system.

As a 'collective' (or whatever) we should be pointing at them and saying "For f*k sakes, why are you not helping us help you?" rather then pointing fingers and laughing.

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 13, 2009 6:28 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

The problem with this is that businesses are groups of people too. Minimal controls on business means business will do whatever they want. Clearly, the only solution is to get rid of humanity!

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 14, 2009 2:09 UTC (Fri) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

So it's a problem of government sitting on their hands, and the best way to rectify that problem is to cut off government's arms.

Yep. That makes sense.

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 13, 2009 15:15 UTC (Thu) by Doogie (guest, #59626) [Link] (1 responses)

Blaming the "government" is easy and feels good, but is completely pointless. Where is the rationality in voting for people who claim to hate the government and then expecting them to do a good job running it? The idea of "drowning the government" is a naive view of how the world works. We saw much the same kind of irrational adherence to an unrealistic ideology in the soviet union and it led them nowhere.

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 13, 2009 16:11 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

'Blaming the "government" is easy and feels good, but is completely pointless.'

You may feel so, however it is not a simple fact. Placing the blame in the right spot, large powerful institutions backed by force does not seem pointless to me. Blaming those who manipulate and take advantage of a large "legitimate" corruption tool seems silly since you provide them with the tool and label the tool legitimate in the first place. You effectively create an environment where any behavior sanctioned by your institution is legitimate, you have no standing to blame the abusers unless you yourself never use the institution to ever abuse anyone else with it. Let's call a spade a spade, and stop labeling the tool legitimate since there are very few legitimate uses of the tool (the only really legitimate uses of it are those which undermine it).

Point out that the emperor has no clothes. Just because many people pick an institution and label it legitimate does not mean it is actually any more legitimate than the mafia, especially if they use similar tactics. One just happens to be much larger and more powerful and therefore able to rule over more people and collect a lot more "protection money" while waging much larger turf wars.

If there is the possibility that one extra person is willing to attempt to rationalize (instead of blindly accepting) the difference between the two institutions, does not seem pointless to me. In fact, it would be a real step towards changing the world, a step which is likely to have much more influence than any vote in any institution that I could vote in.

'Justifiably' Proud

Posted Aug 12, 2009 17:30 UTC (Wed) by jejb (subscriber, #6654) [Link] (3 responses)

> On swpat.org, I'm documenting i4i v. Microsoft and Microsoft's lost cases)

Actually, there is cause for hope in the Injunction. There's a line that says:

"This injunction does not apply to any of the above actions wherein any of the infringing and future word products, upon opening an XML file, applies a custom transformation that removes all custom XML elements"

This implies the infringement was something to do with the way the Microsoft files use custom XML elements. These were a main bone of contention in the ISO approval process and more significantly, ODF doesn't use custom XML extensions, so it might not infringe the patent.

Obviously, someone would need to read the trial transcript to assure us that this is indeed the point of infringement.

where's the trial transcript

Posted Aug 12, 2009 18:17 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (2 responses)

Any idea where or when one might find a copy of the trial transcript?

where's the trial transcript

Posted Aug 12, 2009 21:00 UTC (Wed) by jejb (subscriber, #6654) [Link] (1 responses)

It looks like it's available through pacer:

http://dockets.justia.com/docket/court-txedce/case_no-6:2...

But you'd need an account on the system just to find out. Justitia has no documents on it, just the pacer references.

where's the trial transcript

Posted Aug 14, 2009 21:22 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I'm sure people have noticed, but check on GrokLaw. The current top story is this one, and I think there's a transcript of the judgement.

Cheers,
Wol

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 14:08 UTC (Wed) by sbakker (subscriber, #58443) [Link] (7 responses)

Wow. The army of blind monkeys that is the USPTO has done it again (or, rather, did it eleven years ago).

The basic idea is very simple and comes down to, "one piece of data addressing pieces somewhere else and some way to combine the whole."

Abstract from that a little, and any piece of software that can handle references, inclusion and/or macros is likely to infringe on this (probably including gcc and even the combination of cat+ext3).

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 15:02 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

The patent application is from 1994. Even ext2 would have been too late to invalidate it.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 17:19 UTC (Wed) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

ext2 is just a heavily simplified version of UFS - and UFS was created in 1984.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 15:12 UTC (Wed) by etrusco (guest, #4227) [Link] (3 responses)

Is it also part of the trial to decide whether the patent application is valid?

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 18:16 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm no expert on the USA's system, but I'd guess, if the trial can examine the patent's validity, it can only do so *if* the defendant argued that the patent was invalid.

MS is probably uneasy about making those sort of arguments since it could come back to haunt them. MS has their own XML patents

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 18:53 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (1 responses)

Perhaps, but this injunction might be enough of a blow to wake them up and make them realize that the patent system is hurting everyone.

Maybe.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 19:47 UTC (Wed) by bersl2 (guest, #34928) [Link]

Ah, wishful thinking...

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 13, 2009 0:21 UTC (Thu) by PaulWay (subscriber, #45600) [Link]

> The basic idea is very simple and comes down to, "one piece of data
> addressing pieces somewhere else and some way to combine the whole."

NEVER do this. Patent lawyers do NOT just go around liberally applying meaning to whatever in the patent takes their fancy; they have a very specific and strict interpretation of it. If they say "Document" in the patent it doesn't mean "anything that might even vaguely resemble a document", it means some specific interpretation which is either in the patent or in the dialogue between the patent office and the patentor. You have to read all of that to make sure you understand exactly what the patent covers (unfortunately).

Tridge showed this with the FAT patent - he had to read the entire patent and the dialogue (I forget the exact term for this) in order to understand exactly what was patented, which was a *very* small subset of what might have been inferred from the language of just the patent itself. This dialogue also showed that the patent had been knocked back several times because of specific conflicts with other patents (most which had expired but still prevented the idea being repatented).

Tridge's FAQ for the second FAT kernel patch also pointed out that speculating wildly in a public forum (or anywhere a message can be stored later) about the nature of a patent or what it applies to can be used in evidence against us. Even if you turn out to be hopelessly wrong the lawyers can just argue that your original opinion holds weight (I'm paraphrasing - look Tridge's FAQ up).

I don't have much respect for patents, and the USPTO has shown itself to allow lots of really spurious things, but I would be very careful in criticising them out of hand.

Have fun,

Paul

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 14:46 UTC (Wed) by leonb (guest, #3054) [Link] (8 responses)

LaTeX separates the text files from the style files.
That was introduced in the early 1980s.

- L.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 15:06 UTC (Wed) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link] (7 responses)

The patent isn't only about separation of text and styles -- they reference that part as prior art. As far as I can tell, it's about having a raw text document, with no markup, and another meta-document that has the metadata codes (markup) along with offsets into the raw text. The idea being that if the user adds bold to some text, the raw document doesn't have to change -- only the meta-document markup along with offsets.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 15:21 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (4 responses)

But that's not the way .docx works! (Or is it? I'm just assuming since docx is a competitor to odf and odf has markup inline.) There must be something else to this.

Strategic move

Posted Aug 12, 2009 15:32 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

The best move for these trolls at this point would be to issue a permission letter for implementation under all the common reciprocal licenses (anything incompatible with the MSFT Office EULA). That would hush up at least the open source subset of the computer history buff peanut gallery, and make prior art less likely to pop up.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 16:17 UTC (Wed) by Yorick (guest, #19241) [Link] (2 responses)

To the best of my knowledge, it is indeed how .docx works. It cannot be all there is to it, because
I am fairly sure that idea is not new at all (what about old MacOS SimpleText files - didn't they
put all the mark-up in the resource fork, keeping plain text in the data fork?)

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 16:28 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

The claims refer to a "menu" (some graphical user interface?) to access the information encoded by the metadata.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Sep 9, 2009 15:48 UTC (Wed) by SEMW (guest, #52697) [Link]

A quick look into a docx file doesn't really seem to support that. True, document metadata, images, charts, etc. are all spread over dozens of files in various folders, but the file which contains the actual document text (document.xml) is still heavily loaded with xml tags.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 17:18 UTC (Wed) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link]

The fact that such an "invention" is legitimately patentable makes me want to jump out the window.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 13, 2009 15:21 UTC (Thu) by sderose (guest, #60238) [Link]

US Patent 5,557,722 (based on a product released in late 1990) discloses an SGML-based system that stores the tree structure, the element-types, the style information, and the content in entirely separate, interconnected files. That system allowed the end user to completely swap stylesheets at any time. There are many other patents related to the same system.

That patent also cites about 35 pieces of prior art, much of which also seems to me directly relevant; some of which include editing as well and some of which goes relevantly back to 1979. Having been the primary architect of that system, I can say with certainty that the notions of separating structure and content, doing so for arbitrary DTDs, and being able to change style, structure, and content separately, were all well-known and implemented at the time in the SGML world (which obviously bears directly on XML).

I haven't analyzed the new patent in depth, but from the abstract and the discussions, this seems to me pretty definitive prior art. I wonder if it came up in the case?

Steve

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 17:50 UTC (Wed) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (2 responses)

I love these guys.

Every time Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. get kicked in the nuts by a patent troll, the patent system gets another crack in it.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 19:02 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (1 responses)

Any of the big companies certainly benefits from the status quo of software patents. From time to time they have to succumb to patent claims but that's not something a little cross licensing can't remedy, apart from the patent trolls and they can be paid. It's a small price to keep small movers and innovators out of the market.

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 20:03 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Also things like patent portfolios and whatnot are considured assests and often can make it easier to get loans and other favoriable deals for investors.

If you think about it a large amount of patents lowers the risk to investors if company goes under. Those patents don't evaporate and when the company goes into bankrupcy then those patents can be sold to other companies and get some money back for the investors.

The USA software patent situation were to change then the perceived value of many large corporations could be affected quite negatively.

In fact this is probably how many patent trolls get started... A software company goes under and then sells off their patents to wealthy lawyers. Then those lawyers form limited liability corporations to those patents and start trolling with them.

The real losers

Posted Aug 12, 2009 23:46 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Is, of course, all of us. We will be paying more for software as a result of this. Yeah, I know - some will say we all use free software here. But, our governments don't. Our kids in schools don't. And we all pay for this.

Sad, sad, sad. The legislators persist with this kind of nonsense (i.e. software patents), because they must have some interest in it. Otherwise, there is a clear negative for the society as a result of this.

PS. For the ones not believing that this particular patent is nothing but an algorithm, just read the patent text. They actually _explicitly_ say it is. Pathetic.

Lucky the EU don't recognize software patents.

Posted Aug 13, 2009 5:27 UTC (Thu) by penguin (guest, #36771) [Link]

If software patents had been approved in the EU the last time it was lobbied for Microsoft would probably be banned to sell Word there too.

The biggest problems with software patents arent that software is patentable, its that any action on a computer whatsoever seems patentable. Take two random actions, combine them and bam, instant US patent.