Microsoft Word Patent Case Going To Supreme Court 207
jfruhlinger writes "Microsoft may have had to change Word after being found guilty of violating a Canadian company's patents, but it's still resisting paying for damages — and is taking the fight to the US Supreme Court. If you can't stand either MS or patents, who do you root for here?"
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
So Canadian Court says pay money
What Canadian court? Unless you for some reason think the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit [reuters.com] is actually Canadian.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
So Canadian Court says pay money, so you go above them to the US Supreme Court, aka, Court of the World?
The Company and its people are Canadian, but i4i came to the US to sue Microsoft in the US District court of Eastern Texas.
Note, this is one of those cases of true alleged evil [zdnet.com].
i4i is not a patent troll. They developed software. They showed Microsoft the software, in the hopes of Microsoft licensing it.
Microsoft reviewed the technology, apparently decided to not license it / not incorporate the technology.
The next version of Word included Microsoft's own copycat implementation of exactly the technology. And came to the market competing against i4i's product instead of properly licensing i4i's product.
IOW, this is not a bunk "obvious method" software patent. This is exactly the type of things patents are designed to prevent.
Wholesale stealing of a significant invention.
And the allegation of willful infringement appeared to be a reasonable allegation for i4i to make.
I normally go against software patents, but only because often the things that are patented are not inventions, or attempts are made to apply the patent to things simpler or more fundamental than the invention.
In this case, however, I would not object to i4i enforcing this patent and that succeeding
Re:Since Microsoft is Evil (Score:5, Informative)
This used to be true. Now Microsoft has been threatening people with patent litigation. If fact, they took the outstanding step of suing Motorola - several times! [zdnet.com]
Of course this is neither here nor there on the evilness issue. That's a story that has no beginning and no end, its purity no degree.
MS is in the wrong here. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, duh. (Score:1, Informative)
So, you root for the biggest patentwhore ever?
[citation needed]
Aside from some rumblings about Linux (mostly via SCO), and one or two FAT-related suits, MSFT has been very quiet with their patent portfolio.
If anything MSFT has been one of the biggest players fighting against software patents (not out of any kind of philanthropy, mind you, mostly because they want to use the tech without sharing the licensing fees).
Over the past five years, Microsoft has been a defendant in 96 patent cases. In most of those cases, Microsoft describes the plaintiffs as "patent trolls." Over the same time period, Microsoft was a plaintiff in 11 cases.
source [blogspot.com]
actual source (reg required) [law.com]
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
This patent is certainly less trivial than most, but like most things in computer technology it is not much of an "invention". The basic idea here is content / representation separation in document generation, something that goes back to the first automated business information systems. The idea of sticking a section like this in the middle of another document is about as exotic as the notion of include files and macros, which also go back decades prior.
In the early 1990s the idea of active content and embedded objects was all the rage. In fact Microsoft has been sued on those grounds before, by someone else who pulled out an idea that was "in the air" at the time. Not because it was an "invention", but because it was commercially practical.
Virtually every idea in computer science has been thought of decades prior, and the only reason long expired patents aren't already held on them is because the level of computing power didn't make them commercially practical at the time. These folks appear to have an excellent implementation of inline xml expansion, but it hardly ranks as an "invention" of the sort that no one would independently come up with for years to come.
And that is one of the basic problems with the patent system - give a company a twenty year monopoly on something that is at best a couple years advance on the prior art. The patent system is made for fields that experience a basic technological changeover about once a century, not fields that do that every ten years or so.
That is why the claim that they "ripped off our technology" has about as much credibility as the claim "I played a heretofore unknown chord on the piano". A minor twist on something bouncing around in the heads of computer scientists for decades prior at best.
Re:Since Microsoft is Evil (Score:5, Informative)
SCO's fight against Linux was funded in part by Microsoft. Then there are the 235 mystery patents that Linux supposedly violated. They're more into scare tactics than outright patent war,
Re:Since Microsoft is Evil (Score:1, Informative)
>>When have you seen them going after other companies if they don't provoke the legal fight first?
How about the whole linux patent thing..
Re:Since Microsoft is Evil (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft kind of does oppose software patents. When have you seen them going after other companies if they don't provoke the legal fight first? They have also freed their patents to open and free-to-use patents organizations. The only cases where Microsoft has used their patents portfolio to fight against patent trolls is, well, when the patent troll has started going after MS first. Ultimately, the whole software patent system is faulty. But currently, companies have to go by it and that means Microsoft has to register their patents too. Blame the system.
NO: http://eupat.ffii.org/gasnu/microsoft/index.en.html [ffii.org]
Re:Well, duh. (Score:1, Informative)
Found some updated numbers:
Samsung: 83580 [patents.com]
IBM: 65241 [patents.com]
Microsoft: 36327 [patents.com]
HP: 26606 [patents.com]
Intel: 23272 [patents.com]
Though, I'm not sure what those numbers include (inactive/expired/pending patents?).
But it is an indication that there are far bigger patent players than MS (or even IBM).
Then again, the Samsung numbers include patents on things like Dishwashers. (are there STILL patentable things being done with dishwashers?!)
Having said that, I own a copy of IBM and the Holocaust. So I am not a big fan. And having said that, the father of ms. Santax happens to be responsible for sales in Europe of IBM... So anyway I look at it, I will end up fucked :')
Honestly, I'm actually kind of an MS fan (flame suit on), well compared to most on /.
Their products are decent and keep me employed.
Though I am cheering Ubuntu on, it's come a long way and would probably be my primary desktop OS save for its lack of support for games and MS-Office (OO.org isn't there yet).
Re:First (Score:1, Informative)
Patents are good, not evil.
However patents should not be able to change owner, a patent should die with it's owner. In company model this means when a company holds a patent, the patents becomes invalid when the company is subemerged into an other owner. While the owner of the company holding the patent can change, the company cannot give the patent holding to a other company. When a company is bankrupt or inactiv the patent should die.
Same thing with persons holding patents, the patents should not be able to gain a new owner. That way you protect the inventor and their work, but nobody else can capitalize on someone elses work.
With such a model patents would do what they are ment for. Maybe also company patents should have a lifetime restriction, e.g. 15-30 years, as companies might not ever die, or get subemerged into other companies.
Re:Sue the patent office (Score:3, Informative)
I wish I could find the public statement where they basically said it isn't their responsibility to search for prior art.
My guess is that you're making an oblique, and somewhat confused, reference to the rules that were never implemented as a result of the Tafas v. Doll lawsuit, where some folks actually did sue the USPTO. Among other things, the rules would have required the applicant to perform a search and submit the results in cases where more than 5 independent and/or 25 total claims are filed. Since the USPTO lost the lawsuit, the rules were never implemented. Note that even if the rule had been implemented, it would not have obviated the need for the USPTO to conduct its own search, and at no time has the USPTO indicated that it would not conduct searches of the prior art.
On the other hand, in this case, the USPTO was most definitely not shirking its duties. The evidence presented by Microsoft is some of i4i's own software from the early 1990s, which was sold in the US more than a year before the filing date. The USPTO would only have had access to this software if i4i had presented it during prosecution, which they didn't. And Microsoft also was unable to submit the evidence during the re-examination proceedings, since only patent documents and other publications can be presented at re-exam.
Microsoft can win here but still lose at trial (Score:3, Informative)
If Microsoft is successful here, then it will be easier to invalidate questionable patents, especially when using prior art or other evidence not considered by the Patent Office. This is significant because the Patent Office often does not have the time or resources to search all possible prior art, especially art that has not been neatly cataloged and indexed for search (e.g. that ancient piece of software you remember using in the 80s that did exactly what the patent claims but isn't sold anymore).
An important feature of this case is that even if Microsoft wins at the Supreme Court level, the patent may still be found valid and infringed. If Microsoft wins and the case goes back down to the trial court, it's entirely possible that the judge will say "nope, the evidence still doesn't meet the new lower standard; pay up."
Re:Well, duh. (Score:3, Informative)
they didn't partner with MS, their tech was bought by Homeland security to help filter documents relating to potential terrorists, MS saw what the tech did and suddenly.. the next version of Word came out with exactly the same technology in it. The original judge awarded them $40m for 'intentional patent infringement'.
According to the court: In court documents, Judge Leonard Davis revealed a "particularly damaging" Microsoft internal e-mail that not only acknowledged i4i's patent (No. 5,787,449), but listed the patent number and stated Word would make i4i's technology "obsolete."
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/176685.asp [seattlepi.com]