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."
Surprise (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Surprise (Score:5, Funny)
We at Microsoft are doing nothing wrong, I give you my Word... bundled with Excel, Powerpoint........
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It means Schrödinger's cat is stuck up a tree.
Sauce for the goose. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
They are reaping what they sowed. It doesn't make the patent troll any less despicable though.
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:5, Insightful)
A fine won't change things (Score:5, Insightful)
They've ponyed up well over a billion dollars in the last five years alone. Another fine won't change anything.
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/deleted/ Perhaps they will lose this case and have to pony up some dollar but if anyone thinks the sale of Word is going to be impeded for even a day then they are naive in the extreme.
True, all they are fighting about is not paying up unless they have to.
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Ugh. If this was Google defending their patent portfolio
Microsoft isn't "defending its patent portfolio." It's being sued for infringement by a competitor, and even that competitor isn't "defending its own patent portfolio", it's suing to protect its business, using its patent portfolio (which might be just this one patent, for all we know).
I appreciate a preemptive "You're all Google fanbois, if it was Microsoft, blah blah" rant for it's humor value, but at least take your trolling seriously.
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it's suing to protect its business
Correct. It's not a patent troll. It's a company with working product who attempted a partnership, got rebuffed by Microsoft after they jumped through hoops and Microsoft went ahead and used their technology anyway.
It's typical Microsoft. If they can hold off payment of the lawsuit long enough, they get the IP they stole for free.
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Correct. It's not a patent troll. It's a company with working product who attempted a partnership, got rebuffed by Microsoft after they jumped through hoops and Microsoft went ahead and used their technology anyway.
AFAICT Microsoft looked at their technology and decided that it shouldn't be covered by a patent (it should be impossible to get a patent on implementing an Open specification, after all; that's pretty much the peak of obviousness) and went ahead and reimplemented it. If they actually stole it then this would be a copyright suit. And even that's not theft, but in this case, we could allow the use of the term because they're selling it, and thus perhaps actually depriving someone of a sale.
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it should be impossible to get a patent on implementing an Open specification
Well, there seem to several misunderstandings here. Firstly I believe that the patent is quite old and pre-dates the open specifications that we are discussing, in which case the implementation might be obvious now (based on the literature now), but probably wasn't when the patent was made.
Secondly, patents are not about "doing things", they are about "ways of doing things". Thus, the open standard might say "put the ball in the hoop" and a standard method of doing it might be to throw the ball. However,
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The fact that the action is specified in an open standard doesn't in any way influence your ability to patent a way of doing that.
It should, because the standard suggests a way of doing things just by reading through it. Most of the ways to implement a specification will be obvious, because there's only so many ways to do the same thing before you're just reaching new levels of obfuscation.
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There are people that will complain about anything, without regards to accuracy or fairness. I'm all for pointing out problems, but I don't know enough of this exact situation to decide at this point. Other than my basic feeling t
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:5, Insightful)
"On slashdot, probably never. They won't stop MS bashing until both it and Bill Gates are dead. Then they'll bash whatever company took the top slot on the techie pain chain. Hey, if history had been a little different, it would have been Apple and Stevie getting the grease job..."
It's amazing how many morons are willing to defend a company that based it's growth on dishonesty. "If history had been a little different" my ass. N. Korea's Kim il Jung is despised because he's a ruthless bastard. Bill Gates is despised because he's a ruthless bastard. How could history have been a little different?
Get over yourself.
Maybe your next astroturfing job will be in a nice big football stadium somewhere, and people will actually appreciate your work.
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"On slashdot, probably never. They won't stop MS bashing until both it and Bill Gates are dead.
Now that's just a lie. I'll settle for Ballmer instead of gates!
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Kim Jong-Il is so utterly irrelevant ...
"You'd all do it if you got the chance" is such a standard criminal's justification that it's really worth thinking about it properly every time you hear it. It really sounds like it might be true, however, you'll find that if you drop your wallet somewhere, 9 times out of 10 someone comes running with it to you. It's just not true and the Kim Jong-Il example is very good for making people realise what they actually wouldn't do. (Almost?) nobody is perfect, we all do little things, like accidentally dro
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.
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I agree that in this case patents are working as they are supposed to. I have read the patent and it is as good as software patent can be. I had never thought separating XML tags from the text.
Could it be that Microsoft announced it's very weak XML patent just before this case to get people confused. "Microsoft XML patent case" may mean both the very weak XML patent by Microsoft or the strong XML patent against Microsoft.
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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.
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I haven't heard that Groklaw distorts information. Since PJ prints so many original documents, it's hard to see how she could.
You may not agree with PJ's opinions, but her reporting is probably pretty straight.
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The weird thing here is that this is actually a case of a patent working the way that patents are supposed to work:
I thought patents were supposed to protect implementations, not ideas ? How is Microsoft developing their own implementation of the same idea an example of "a patent working the way that patents are supposed to work" ?
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And as I found out the other day this is not the first time recently that Microsoft has been caught out and lost [smartcompany.com.au]. It seems from what these guys were claiming that this is just standard Microsoft business practice. Watching an interview with one of the Uniloc guys he basically said when you try to sell a technology to Microsoft, they try to force you to sign a waiver for your IP rights before they even look at it. I wonder how many small businessmen have been screwed over by this?
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah. Only until Microsoft no longer has a functional monopoly, and isn't seen as a danger. Look what happened to IBM. Let Microsoft drop to that level of influence (and IBM is still a very large company) and we'll mostly drop the bashing.
Almost certainly true, although it doesn't reflect badly on the community.
Techies respect technical excellence, and dislike marketers, with good reason. There are plenty of companies that behave themselves ethically and sell technical excellence. However, that's not how companies get to the top.
IBM was not as unscrupulous as Microsoft, but it was ruthless. Standard policy was to sell to levels above the techies, and so the techies had IBM equipment forced on them, whether or not it was the right stuff for the job. While IBM was into research and technology, that wasn't the primary drive. It was sales and marketing.
Any company that comes to be the next IBM or Microsoft will do so by ruthless marketing, and techies will be forced to cope. If that company becomes an effective monopoly (as IBM was and Microsoft is), it will distort the techie world, and impede innovation and technical advancement, and other things techies value.
So, the good news for Microsoft, insofar as Microsoft cares about us, is that if Microsoft market share drops to maybe 50% or so, so that competing OSs are viable options in most circumstances, and so that Microsoft needs to take interoperability seriously, we'll stop bashing Microsoft.
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"Hey, if history had been a little different, it would have been Apple and Stevie getting the grease job..."
Wait, we *don't* bash Apple and Stevie at every opportunity?
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ugh. If this was Google defending their patent portfolio (like the idiotic patent they just took out on their homepage) I bet we'd have all the corporate flavour of the week groupies heralding their courageousness in fighting patent trolls. But because it's Microsoft, we have idiots like parent poster saying they should abandon the lawsuit and instead seek to reform the patent system.
When are people going to grow up and look at the world with at least at attempt at objectivity?
Hey, goon. Where have you been all these years when Microsoft have been abusing its customers, Its competitors, and the marketplace? Microsoft accuses competitors of violating its crappy patents. And refuses to identify said patents to the people they are accusing of stealing the so called "intellectual Property" Instead it is running an extortion/protection racket going around to companies behind the scenes telling them to pay Microsoft for LINUX CODE. People had busted their ass to create GNU/LInux based operating systems and MS thinks its ok to go EXTORT companies for code they have nothing to do with. They LIE in the marketplace about competitors products. They funneled money to SCO to keep their lawsuit going against Linux. They commissioned false studies claiming their product is superior. They are LIARS and totaly untrustworthy. They have BRIBED officials in international standards bodies along with egregiously stacking voting panels in their favor. They are slimy mobsters.
So you see goon? They reaped what they sew. And no one but goons like you are sympathetic to them because they are slime.
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Evidence?
Err, sorry, I mean, do you have any EVIDENCE for any of that?
Why is it OK to be against software patents on one day, except when it's someone you despise on the wrong end of a lawsuit? What makes this patent holier than all the rest, and why do you think OpenOffice and other programs would remain safe? i4i's promise not to sue Sun later on is not binding, and there are only half a million projects out there that use XML and support custom schemas. Fuck, Word is just the tip of the iceberg here. Mic
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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 an
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Corporations tend to do slimy things for the sake of profit, but a lot of these allegations are tenuous at best. Hey, I'd love to see proof OOXML was bribed into being a standard, to see its ISO certification disappear. It is a nasty, long, dense standard that doesn't help anyone but them. It'd be great if instead they contributed vital enhancements to ODF.
On the other hand, they're on the receiving end of a truly absurd amount of FUD at Slashdot.
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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.
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When are people going to grow up and look at the world with at least at attempt at objectivity?
Within mere moments of pausing to RTFA.
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If this was Google defending their patent portfolio (like the idiotic patent they just took out on their homepage) I bet we'd have all the corporate flavour of the week groupies heralding their courageousness in fighting patent trolls. But because it's Microsoft, we have idiots like parent poster saying they should abandon the lawsuit and instead seek to reform the patent system.
Google's "patent" is just a design patent, which is massively different from what most people think of as a patent. It is only the fact that Slashdot editors are incompetent that it got here.
Second, the i4i suit does not involve any patent trolls.
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.
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.
Re:Sauce for the goose. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it was always just a plain patent infringement case [swpat.org] about using XML for the reason that the mark up language was created. The sad part is that i4i created a product that uses Word for all of its user interface. That means they are using way more of Microsoft's code in their own product than Microsoft could have ever "stolen" from them.
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I think you'll find, if you read more than some trolling blog posts, that Microsoft intends for you to add stuff to Office documents, and also has a whole Office developer section for people to "use way more of their code", its perfectly ok if its offered to you as a feature of the product they want you to use.
Anyway, i4i had a separate product that, in this case, was taken by MS and included into Word documents. This article gives a better description of why everyone thinks MS is the thief. [seattlepi.com]
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No, it was always just a plain patent infringement case [swpat.org] about using XML for the reason that the mark up language was created. The sad part is that i4i created a product that uses Word for all of its user interface. That means they are using way more of Microsoft's code in their own product than Microsoft could have ever "stolen" from them.
How is writing a plugin for Word make i4i using "Microsoft code in their own product" ? If Microsoft is not OK with the plugin they could have removed the plugin functionality form Word instead of really stealing from i4i.
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So? Almost all software patents have implementations. That doesn't make them legit.
I don't get why Slashdot screams bloody murder when software patents are brought up in conversation about open source products, but when Microsoft or one of the "bad guys" is on the receiving end of a lawsuit it's A-OK with you guys.
You are the cancer that is killing /., is what I'm trying to say. They aren't a patent troll? Come on, grow up. You can be a patent troll with a product, just like all those other software patent
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But, you seem to be having fun demolishing a strawman, so why should I stop you
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They -are- a patent troll. Just like any other company that sues for obvious, trivial software patents and non-inventions. They're all seeking to make money by extortion or lawsuit for something that really isn't patent-worthy, hence: patent troll.
At times, even Microsoft has been a patent troll, so have many other companies. Stop treating everyone differently with these trivial patents, rather than playing favorites just because a company you don't like is involved.
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 positi
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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.
Seems appropriate (Score:5, Interesting)
If i4i wins the appeal, the court can make Microsoft pay for the unlicensed use of the patent. This way the patent still does what patents are supposed to do in most general terms: reward the inventor for sharing his inventor with the public. If Microsoft wins, i4i might not be able to reimburse them for lost sales.
This said, I think software patents are counterproductive and should be abolished. And maybe patents in general. For an interesting e-book on this topic, see http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm [dklevine.com]
But it still would be fun to see Microsoft's cash cow whacked with the patent hammer. Especially after their petty lawsuit against TomTom.
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Re:Seems appropriate (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry for the late response. I spent the first half hour trying to post from my copy of 1984, but eventually concluded that there is in fact a difference, and went back to the approach of using software rather than books ;-)
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But did patents ever work as expected?
According to chapter 1 of "Against Intellectual Monopoly" (see my first post), the patents of Boulton and Watt impeded the development of the steam engine rather than promoting it. That was 200+ years ago. Today we still have similar problems. That is reason enough to doubt the usefulness of patents in general.
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reward the inventor for sharing his inventor with the public
That's some orgy porn I don't particularly want to see.
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But in the interim, microsoft makes bucketloads of cash from selling their infringing product, and since they're not being hurt in any way from that infringement, they can drag out the court case for many years and there's no rush to fix it via patch. Meanwhile, i4i loses their business to microsoft's infringing product, and potentially runs out of money before the patent case is ever resolved, and may eventually end up as just a patent shell company.
Justice delayed is justice denied. An injunction against
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Meanwhile, i4i loses their business to microsoft's infringing product, and potentially runs out of money
You have a point about the risk of bankruptcy. Otherwise, I disagree:
Until a final verdict is reached, the court should avoid doing something irreversible. Like crashing the market for MS Office. On the other hand, money can be redistributed later if necessary. As in "Microsoft, you have infringed the patent. Pay $20 for each copy of Word since 2009".
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Except that it doesn't destroy the market for Microsoft Office - all Microsoft had to do to comply with the injunction was release a version without the patent-infringing feature. Since only a small percentage of Office users actually make use of said feature, it won't even affect most of their users.
In capitalist america, (Score:1, Interesting)
money buys justice [nytimes.com]. But this is the age of the internet, where information is everywhere and nobody reads anything. So "word" is obsolete. All we need is YouTube!
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If MS was my business, it wouldn't have been out stealing i4i's IP and then directly going after their customer base.
I4i has just as much of a right to sell it's software as MS does. MS interfered with I4i's ability to sell their product, now they need just shut up and take their medicine.
I get so sick of people defending the indefensible, of people following MS's lead and supporting corrupt business practices.
Small victory?!? (Score:1, Insightful)
I am pretty sure Microsoft is more than capable of making this lawsuit last as long as they want to. Until, e.g. they do not use the tech anymore...
what a relief .. (Score:5, Funny)
--
Ubersoft Marketing Language [ubersoft.net]
Re:what a relief .. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it's terrible.
What we need is some kind of "open" office suite of tools, to replace Microsoft Office.
Someone should start a project.
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Lots of people still use 2003.
OpenOffice? What's that?
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OpenOffice
IBM Lotus Symphony (a free office suite which also includes a word processor)
Abiword
If I wanted to pay for something, Word Perfect would also be a great alternative.
On my Linux computer, I have these excellent free alternatives installed:
OpenOffice
IBM Lotus Symphony
Abiword
KOffice
Scribus
I do not actually h
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Currently, the most needed piece of software missing from productivity suites are an 'access' like product (read : a SQL query + reporting tool).
For the rest.. I completely agree... myself (like you) haven't had any MS Office product installed on my computer(s) (some of the running Windows) for a long time (~3 years).
--Ivan
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I have not actually yet tried creating a small database with OpenOffice Base, so I am not sure if OpenOffice Base is a mature enough alternative yet, or not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Base
http://www.openoffice.org
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I haven't used Access since Office 97 or 2000. Base is pretty close in features to those, but I don't think it is up to the latest versions of Access. I'm using Base at work for asset inventory reporting and water quality database (replacing excel, which is all that the techs have used in the past).
I haven't been able to get the Sun report builder extension working yet in either Linux or Windows, but that is about the only piece that is missing. I can generate reports, but the graphing crashes, and that is
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Access is only "needed" mostly by people with little knowledge of SQL who will then proceed to produce the database from hell.
Access is scriptable with Visual Basic for Applications; one can use it as an application platform on top of either SQL Server Express or Jet. With plain old SQL, you still need an app framework to present the forms and run the business logic.
Status Quo (Score:5, Interesting)
The legal system in the US is fixated on maintaining the status quo when it comes to major corporations. There is this "too big to (fail/not be sold)" mentality and that's what's saving Word. If it was "Joe's Word Processor" that was the infringing software, the sales injunction would have held.
It's a shame, because I would have really liked to see Dell and the others putting OpenOffice or another alternative on their computers for a few months while this thing got sorted out. And that's what should have happened. The products that didn't violate patents should have been given a competitive advantage over those that did.
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This is an application of well-settled law on the question of when injunctions should be issued:
The little guy gets the same break (Score:3, Insightful)
The legal system in the US is fixated on maintaining the status quo when it comes to major corporations.
The legal systems in the U.S. tend to preserve the status quo in any litigation until a final decision is rendered.
Microsoft is a multi-national with $60 billion in revenues and no significant debt. It is in no way seriously threatened.
But a similar injunction against a geek's one-man operation would be ruinous.
Surpise... not. (Score:2, Insightful)
M$ has more money than i4i.
M$ wins in court.
Case closed.
That's how the legal system works nowadays.
Lobbying, bribes and little brown envelopes under the table.
M$ even support bribery in their own in-house information.
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A stay is not a win. It means the injunction won't go into force until the appeal is concluded.
Nothing about that is abnormal.
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
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Anonymous Coward wrote:
I must respectfully disagree with the last sentence. Although Microsoft (MS) is dominant in the computer industry, it is not the only player. In the case of operating systems and office applications, there are alternatives.
As an example, I've been using StarOffice for a few years, and for the m
Please Explain (Score:2)
There are other alternatives to Microsoft products, such as Linux, Open Office, Mac OS, etc., so please explain to me how they are a monopoly. They dominate the market, but other products, such as Apple's iPod or Google's search engine also dominate the market without being labeled monopolies.
They were convicted in a U.S. court, but the U.S. legal system is probably the worst in the civilized world, with the dumbest judges and juries, and the greediest, most unscrupulous lawyers.
I4i's patent is vague
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Except that this case isn't from a patent troll. These guys did the development, sell a product and tried to sell it to MS, who turned around and built their own. This is the kind of case the patent system should be handling.
Actually, if I4I had been smart, they'd have sold out to a patent troll, took the money and run.
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Prior art up the wazoo means they are still a patent troll.
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Have you actually read the patent? Care to suggest any suitable prior art?
Re:no one wins when patent trolls do. (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft's court papers cite a number of SGML editors that implement more or less the same features, in various combinations; anything that i4i implements that wasn't already in them is a pretty obvious extension or adaptation. The court didn't find that argument persuasive, because the non-obviousness bar for software patents is so ludicrously low that "clicking once" is a valid patent.
Re:no one wins when patent trolls do. (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that the SGML editors don't, as far as I can tell. Certainly, the one I looked at that Microsoft cited in fact turned out to be nothing like the patent.
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Allow me to paraphrase.
"Patent trolls suck, but I want my favorite patent troll to win!"
FFS, unless MS actually loses money, they won't "get behind patent reform" because their strategy will have been successful. If your logic is logic at all, then you WANT MS to lose a billion fucking dollars. THEN MS will actively lobby for patent reform.
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You may be right - we are speculating, of course. But, every loss for MS focuses a little more attention an the problem. Of course, the attention that is really required is the attention of investors. They have been reaping a lot of profit over the years. When that profit begins to slow down, they will sit up and take notice. When they take notice, they talk to the people who actually run the company, etc etc.....
1 billion, 5 billion, or 20 billion, whatever it takes, I want to see it happen!