Court Allows Microsoft To Sell Word During Appeal 106
An anonymous reader sends along this update to the ongoing patent battle between Microsoft and i4i involving XML formatting in Word.
"Microsoft's motion to stay an injunction has been granted; the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has allowed the company to keep selling Word as it appeals a patent ruling from last month. The injunction had an effective date of October 10, but the motion to stay blocks the injunction until the appeal process is complete. If upheld, the injunction wouldn't stop existing users from using Word, but it could prevent the software giant from selling Word 2003 or Word 2007, the most common versions of Word currently on the market, and would require the company to significantly tweak Word 2010, which is slated for the first half of next year. The victory is a small one for Microsoft; the company still has the whole appeals process to go through. 'We are happy with the result and look forward to presenting our arguments on the main issues on September 23,' a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. 'Microsoft's scare tactics about the consequences of the injunction cannot shield it from the imminent review of the case by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal on the September 23 appeal,' said i4i chairman Loudon Owen in response to the court's decision."
Re:no one wins when patent trolls do. (Score:3, Informative)
Prior art up the wazoo means they are still a patent troll.
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:5, Informative)
They are reaping what they sowed. It doesn't make the patent troll any less despicable though.
How many times does this need to be pointed out? i4i is not a patent troll. That doesn't mean they're cute and cuddly panda bears, but they aren't a patent troll, which is defined as suing over patents without having an actual product (or in other words, suing over patents is a patent troll's business model, not building things). i4i does have an actual product, and they claim that Microsoft is competing against their product; after convincing a judge of that, they got the injunction.
They put mil. $$ into getting US style pat. in EU (Score:1, 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"
-- Bill Gates [wikiquote.org] in his "Challenges and Strategy" memo 16 May 1991
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:5, Informative)
i4i does have an actual product, and they claim that Microsoft is competing against their product; after convincing a judge of that, they got the injunction.
I thought the case revolved around Microsoft stealing their product, not competing against it. That Microsoft took their product and bundled their own rather-similar-indeed implementation directly into Word, and that the patent is the only thing i4i has that they can sue MS over. But yes, to re-iterate i4i is not, in any shape or form, a patent troll and this is one case where the patent system is actually working as intended!
Microsoft was very naughty and deserves to sit on the 'do not collect $200 per copy' step.
Microsoft IS for patent reform (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft [swpat.org] does support reform. "Reform" means [swpat.org] making litigation harder for certain types of companies (small companies and companies that don't have a successful product based on the patents), reducing the time for granting patents, and reducing the amount that an infringer can have to pay (by dropping the incentives for litigation, patent trolls [swpat.org] should be less common).
All these measures are good for Microsoft and other dominant players who want to use their portfolio strategically to entrench their positions, but these aren't enough to fix society's problems. We need to abolition of software patents, not any kind of reform.
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:5, Informative)
Way to paint Microsoft as the victim here.
According to GrokLaw, this is what happened:
Whether or not the patent should have been granted is not the issue at this point. It was.
The plaintiff (i4i) had a successful add-on for MS Word that it was selling. In 2003, Microsoft added the same functionality to Word. Microsoft then refused all attempts on i4i's part to license the functionality.
The license fees requested were on the order of $25M. It was Microsoft's repeated refusal to negotiate that resulted in not only a large award, but punitive damages as well.
They (Microsoft) were found liable for willful infringement, so yes, they did steal the patented method.
The weird thing here is that this is actually a case of a patent working the way that patents are supposed to work:
Company A comes up with a reasonably unique and functional solution to a broad problem, patents it and starts selling it. They take it to mega-corp B who has a problem that can be easily solved with company A's product, and mega-corp B -- rather than negotiate with company A, simply steals their design, and incorporates it into their product in the expectation that this will be sufficient to run company A into the ground before any litigation can come to fruition.
The thing to note here, is that I4I's patent isn't just for an idea, it's actually for a real product and an apparently graceful solution to what had previously been an intractible problem.
The XML implementation is simply a specific implementation of their patent, but -- once you have XML -- it's not the only XML solution or even (for many people) the best XML solution.
It is starting to look like they didn't patent the general idea of adding meta-data to a file. They patented a specific way of organizing that meta-data to produce a specific result.
In the broader context of software patents being a bad idea, I would be inclined to classify this as an example of 'good case, bad law'. It is somewhat gratifying to see software patents put to a good use, for once.
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:2, Informative)
The whole point of XML and ancestors / friends (e.g., SGML, HTML) is that the tags add semantics to documents by virtue of their being included with the content. Separating the tags defeats the entire object of XML etc.
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:2, Informative)
This is only a fraction of their egregious behavior. I am sure you know how to use Google. Try it some time. You will find a lot more eye opening info on the ruthless, vicious, unethical mobsters that are Microsoft executives.
I used to defend them back when I was young and ignorant to their marketplace behavior. I have learned a lot over the years. These people are slime.
As far as i4i goes. I think all sofware patents are bad. What makes software so special that it needs the protections of copyright and the patent system? Should music be patented too? How about story concepts in books? The i4i patent on using a standard is ridiculous. Even though they have an actual product based on this patent. I hope i4i loses this suit because they are patenting sofware and methods of using a standard. It still does not take away from the fact that Microsoft reaps what they sow.
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:3, Informative)
If they had concentrated on reforming the patent system, instead of just bolstering their patent portfolio, they could have prevented this. But instead, they prize their own ability to do this to the little guy too highly.
Over its lifetime, Microsoft has filed something like two patent lawsuits involving software patents, not against little guys. I don't recall the details of one, but the other was in a case where the other side was threatening Microsoft over patents, negotiations failed, and both sides filed suit.
During that same time, they've been on the receiving end of patent lawsuits, often from the little guys, numerous times.
The fact is that they have pushed for patent reform to make it harder to get software patents. You make it sound like Microsoft is so powerful that they could cause reform single-handedly, if they just asked for it. Other companies, such as patent giant IBM, have some influence too.
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:1, Informative)
I'd love to see proof OOXML was bribed into being a standard
There were plenty of articles posted here at the time this going on. Just because you ignored it doesn't mean the rest of us did too.