Microsoft Ordered To Pay $290M, Stop Selling Word 272
Cytalk and other readers tipped us to Microsoft's loss in a US appeals court, in a patent case brought by Canadian company i4i. Microsoft must now pay $290M and either stop selling Word (and probably Office) by January 11, or somehow work around the patent by that date. A Seattle PI blog reports that Redmond has a few options left: "In a statement, Microsoft said it was working hard to comply with the injunction. The company also said it is considering further legal options, including possible requests for a new hearing or a writ of certiorari from the US Supreme Court." Update: 12/22 20:47 GMT by KD : Tim Bray has up a blog post explaining why it would be no great loss if Microsoft dropped the "custom XML" feature in dispute.
Update: 12/22 23:04 GMT by KD : Reader adeelarshad82 pointed out a statement released by Microsoft earlier today, which says in part: "We expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date. In addition, the beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are available now for downloading, do not contain the technology covered by the injunction."
Update: 12/22 23:04 GMT by KD : Reader adeelarshad82 pointed out a statement released by Microsoft earlier today, which says in part: "We expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date. In addition, the beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are available now for downloading, do not contain the technology covered by the injunction."
$500 instead of $90 for MS Word? (Score:5, Interesting)
--Greg
Re:Say goodbye for XML (Score:3, Interesting)
Your post is a load of horseshit and furthers my fears that you're a Microsoft shill (your bing posts are borderline brilliant).
This is stupid because Microsoft was moving here to open XML standards from their propriety .doc format. It's a common thing to blame MS for their locked in, own formats since Open Office and others couldn't open them.
What's your point? That since they're being attacked by a patent troll I should forgive them for everything fucking stupid and backward they've done?
i4i's patent is basically XML (yes it really is, read the patent claims [uspto.gov]).
Your expertise as a patent examiner is priceless to me. As is your extreme simplification of something you know nothing about.
Missing option. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
"Microsoft must now pay $290M and either stop selling Word (and probably Office) by January 11, or somehow work around the patent by that date."
They could, you know, settle with i4i and license the patent from them?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I think i4i's patent is legitimate (I'm not really very familiar with this case - somehow missed it before this, will need to study up on it more later). I'm just saying, the list of options seems to leave out one pretty big possibility.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Hear that sound? (Score:5, Interesting)
Its the sound of the patent system beginning to crash down. RIght now there are two choices
1) Take the fundamentally broken US system and roll it out across the world
2) Take the rest of the worlds approach that software can't be patented and roll it out to the UK
The scary thing is that even with judgements like this and the patent trolls out there we are actually seeing the likes of Microsoft push for option 1.
Patents will be the death of innovation if the system continues in this way, particularly if the US judgements are assessed at insane levels of cost. If Microsoft had known about this patent when starting the development they'd have bought the company for less than this judgement.
Re:Obvious solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, on the one hand, the patent gives i4i the right to exclude others from practicing the claimed invention. The court has already told MS that Word is infringing, therefore selling Word would violate the patent rights. MS could simply removing the infringing feature and it could continue selling Word. MS is in control of this aspect.
On the other hand, at the moment, i4i has very little incentive to offer MS any sort of license. i4i won at the lower court and on appeal. Plus, I believe the story goes that they approached MS and MS sent them away and then went ahead and implemented it anyway. They will be able to demand infringement-sized royalties the closer it gets to January 11.
Re:Say goodbye for XML (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Say goodbye for XML (Score:4, Interesting)
But, what's astounding to me, is in 1995 I was using SGML as a method of separating the document content from its layout. The layout wasn't kept in a separate file, but there were mechanisms to apply publishing layout to SGML based on rules. That was the whole point of SGML and its predecessor GML.
Heck, in 1995 Arbor Text had an SGML editor which could apply formatting to SGML documents for the purposes of publishing, and the company I worked for was helping people to install SGML editing and layout systems.
I'm not 100% convinced that these actually represent novel claims. They may not have been described in terms of XML, but the state of the art with SGML sure as hell was doing the whole "maintaining a document's format in a separate file" before this.
Can anyone who understands this a little more identify what specifically is required to infringe on this patent?
Cheers
Re:Say goodbye for XML (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm curious how this patient was granted given that it resembles IBM's Generalized Markup Language (GML) from the 1960s and the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) standardized by the ISO in 1986.
To answer your curiosity, it is because existing prior art is not involved with the granting of a patent.
In other words, it doesn't matter if prior art exists or not, in order to get a patent approved.
Prior art is only used as a defense when being challenged by a patent holder.
So if it truly does count as prior art, it is fully up to Microsoft to present it at the patent case to get the patent thrown out.
That can't happen until after Microsoft is sued for patent violation, which in turn can't happen until someone files for a patent on it.
Since both of those items have come to pass, the question now is, why didn't Microsoft use that as prior art to halt the trial?
The two options that come to mind are
a) They didn't know about it, or
b) they did and tried, but the judge said it was not valid as prior art.
On one hand, being Microsoft I would be shocked if A was the case.
However, on the other hand, being Microsoft it is not too shocking.
Re:Say goodbye for XML (Score:3, Interesting)
You're not alone [cat-v.org].
Re:Say goodbye for XML (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1995 I designed and built (most of) the software for the following CD-ROM:
"Berg, J. van den, Duijfjes-Vellekoop, G.G.J., Kunenborg, R. & Tenback, R. (1995). Marburger Index Datenbank, ein Wegweiser zur Kunst in Deutschland (CD-ROM). Munchen: K.G. Saur Verlag. " (*)
It included several internal parsers, including one for a HTML-like language that separated the content of the database from the on-screen expression. Basically, my own miniature implementation of Mozilla.
It was sold in musea throughout Germany.
I guess that should count as prior art. I'm pretty sure we could dig up the sourcecode if asked nicely.
(*) As an aside, I'm still pretty proud of that software. It runs like a charm on anything from windows 3.11 to Vista, will stay stable even with less than 1 KB of free memory (windows crashes before this program does) and we never had to do a bugfix. Written in around 20000 lines of C++. Chalk one up for rigorously applying and checking invariants and pre- and postconditions.
Re:Say goodbye for XML (Score:1, Interesting)
I've had patent lawyers tell me specifically to never do web searches for something I am working on, specifically because you are required to disclose any prior art you are aware of. If you aren't aware of the prior work, and your patent is the first patent on that work, it will stand in court.
Obligatory quote (Score:2, Interesting)
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."
Re:Say goodbye for XML (Score:4, Interesting)
(BTW checking this took a huge effort, and big searching and I'm still not sure it's the whole truth. It's astounding how much of the media, both "main stream" and alternative/blog is covering this whilst trying to pretend that i4i never did anything useful at all.)
XML is a denial of service attack on us (Score:1, Interesting)
Couldn't agree more. While XML is just crappy, but bearable as a document description language, it is an utter failure as a data description language. It ain't really human-readable and it's machine readable with just a lot of effort.
Whether this push for ever more complex XML-based thingies has method or is just aimless madness, the effect is the same: the decommoditizing [levien.com] of our basic constructs.
When will I need XSLT to just make sense of my /etc/passwd?
Just compare the sizes of the XML library on your computer with the size of an interpreter, compiler or any other program in this category (and this other program is most probably doing something useful!)
My favourite comparison is
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 151308 2009-12-13 23:05 /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1.5.2 /usr/lib/liblua5.1.so.0.0.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 147700 2008-01-26 17:36
And in Lua you get a bytecode interpreter, a proper garbage collector and a decent runtime library for free.
XML is a denial of service attack on us.