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Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

Posted Aug 12, 2009 15:21 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670)
In reply to: Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US by scripter
Parent article: Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US

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.

to post comments

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.


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