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

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 15:06 UTC (Wed) by scripter (subscriber, #2654)
In reply to: Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US by leonb
Parent article: Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

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.

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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