Microsoft forbidden from selling Word, will probably keep selling Word
By Nilay Patel 
posted August 12th 2009 11:42AM
posted August 12th 2009 11:42AM
Hey, remember that seemingly random patent case from May in which a federal jury awarded a company called i4i Ltd $200 million in patent damages against Microsoft? Things just got worse for Redmond: the judge in the case today issued a permanent injunction against sales of Word 2003, Word 2007, and any future versions of Word that can open .xml, .docx, or .docm files containing "custom XML." Yeah, no kidding -- that's pretty much all of 'em. At issue is i4i's patent on a method for reading XML, and obviously Microsoft's vowed to appeal, so expect this injunction to be stayed pending that appeal in short order -- and also expect Microsoft to eventually either find a way to win or simply pay up, since there's no way it'll let anyone kill Word. We'll see what happens. Word.Update: CNET has a quick interview with i4i Chairman Loudon Owen, who says that he himself uses Word and that i4i isn't trying to "stop Microsoft's business" or "interfere with all the users of Word out there." It's an interesting read, go check it out.
Update: Not that it should come as a surprise to anyone at all, but Microsoft has confirmed that it'll be appealing the decision.
Nevermind. Read the patent and really...it's pretty general. Maybe I didn't read it properly and I'm not that good at the law, but there wasn't anything precise enough (imo) that was patent-worthy.
Software patents have GOT to go.
And XML is so trivial and insignificant I can't believe it got its own acronym in the first place.
stupid problem and stupid patent system
For those of you that haven't read anything further on this story, here is some background on the it. This was started a long time ago, before MS supported XML in any fashion. In fact at the time, even though their corporate customers wanted XML they refused to concede sticking to their proprietary formats. i4i developed a way to use Word, since that was what everyone was going to business wise, to author XML documents in a way that allowed them to be read, stored, searched and retrieved far faster than XML had been done in any previous system. They are not patenting XML they are patenting their proprietary system for the document control aspects of the files that are saved in a separate file if I read the story elsewhere correctly. This does not fall under "XML stands for extensible so nothing you do in connection with it can ever be patented".
From what I have searched and read, i4i was like the world leader in XML document control systems at one point in the late 1990's and early 2000's, having licensed their systems to a great deal of large corporations, including some software giants, and also winning the largest software deployment contract ever from the government in the early part of this decade to put a system of over 30,000 licensed seats of their software at (irony here) the US Patent Office. They also were the major contributor to the creating the standard for submitting electronic documentation to the FDA and their software powers more of the pharmaceutical companies than any other system out there, and is used by the FDA as well. It was selected by the Smithsonian to create and store all their documents when they picked a system to move all their document archives to digital format. The list goes on and on of things that this company has accomplished. I had never heard of them until I started reading about this lawsuit but they seem to have been a major player in the XML industry and their software can work with all kinds of other developers systems, including MS share-point services to greatly improve their performance and compatibility. They were on the, lets call it service elevator to the top, not quite the express but moving to become the real heavy hitter in the XML document control industry, until word 2003 came out and used a duplicate system to make XML files only this time with MS controlling the extra file contents. And from what I have read its really a duplicate system, like every aspect of it was carried over, all without licensing it.
Thank you! Finally some more real details. Everybody seems to just blindly blame either side whilst making huge assumptions not based on any actual facts.
Oh, forgot to add that the lawyers for i4i stated in the first court case that they felt $25 million was a fair amount. The judge ruled in favor of i4i but then it went to the jury to decide the damages and they are the ones that set it at $200 million. This was because the jury felt that MS had willfully infringed on the i4i patent, having claimed that they didn't know that i4i had patented their software, so they didn't know they were infringing on it. Despite the fact that MS had known about the previous large contract awarded to i4i for the government agencies over their own systems and their 180 on supporting XML right after this and getting it put into word 2003 then pitching it to the government as not needing any 3rd party software to do the same thing.
Thats just what I read though, its kind of spotty getting the news articles from back around 2000 and like today I'm not sure how much is accurate and how much was biased by the given writers.
Why are we allowing foreign company sue an American company IN AMERICA? They should be suing MS in Toronto and using their legal system and money.
Playing devil's advocate here (trust me I'm usually the first person to complain about "business method" patents), but what if Microsoft reverse engineered this company's XML parser/reader in an effort not to pay to license this company's IP? It's not like Microsoft hasn't done this before--Java being the most obvious. Why should it be okay for Sun to protect their IP and some unknown company not. Also to the naysayers claiming prior art.....ummmm......don't you think that Microsoft has the resources to hire a legal staff to exhaust every opportunity to invalidate a patent? I think that companies have a right to protect the legitimate work they have done. I don't think that this is a case of a frivolous business method lawsuit like the "one-click" purchase or "name your price".
The only question I have is do the judges that are hearing these cases have enough technical knowledge to be able to rule in these cases? I'm sure the same applies to biological patents as well. Do they know enough about programming to be able to adequately know what could be constituted as prior art? Most of these judges probably have a background in mechanical engineering, as this is what was the focus of patent law for decades.
Linux is named after Linus, but only because they guy who hosted the source decided to call it that; it was not Linus' decision (or what he wanted to call it). The Linux kernel - unlike Mac OS - was written from scratch and took its cues from Unix rather than being built on top of it. That's why it's not just another BSD variant.
i dont like word anyway. not since they killed clippy.
[URL=http://s768.photobucket.com/albums/xx323/bbourgeois/?action=view¤t=i4i.jpg][IMG]http://i768.photobucket.com/albums/xx323/bbourgeois/th_i4i.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
Seems like i4i doesn't mind being hypocritical. Unless Microsoft has for some strange reason given them permission to use Word's interface. They even ripped off clippy (no idea why they would want to do THAT...)
Grrr...
UG
Or just click this: http://i768.photobucket.com/albums/xx323/bbourgeois/i4i.jpg
You do realize that the product pictured is, in fact, a plug-in for Microsoft Word.
Which is why it looks like Word and has Clippy on the scene.
Just sayin'....
i4i eh? An eye for an eye, perhaps? I am curious as to the origins of this company. Mayhaps they are founded and directed by someone previously slighted by Redmond?
What the fuck?!
LOL cute ending!
IMHO is right. If you think that an operating system that can be hacked in under five minutes is better, than I think you should see a doctor. Now.
A minor correction, "custom xml" is a term used in the OpenXML standard to refer to a certain kind of third party extension to the format that allows other vendors to store additional information inside the file that Microsoft didn't already account for, so saying that all docx files contain custom xml is pretty misleading.
As far as I know, Word itself never generates any files with custom xml in them, though it is capable of opening and displaying those files (which it generally does by ignoring the custom xml bits since it doesn't know what they're for) and then saving them back out without disturbing the custom xml parts.
There may be some feature of Word documents that Microsoft has chosen to implement in the form of a custom xml part that I'm not aware of, but for the most part everything that's built into Word is implemented expressly as part of the OpenXML and WordML standards.
So my old copy of Office 2000 just became very valuable! ^_^
My friend works here and he says they've been getting spammed [calls & email] all day, including death threats...
People need to read the patent, or at least dennisheadley's comment: http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/12/microsoft-forbidden-from-selling-word-will-probably-keep-sellin/comments/20840606/ FTW
Where is "here"?
"i4i isn't trying to stop Microsoft's business"
Clearly not. They just want lots of money from one of the biggest targets around.
Its probebly buy them out.
Http://www.usjobcareer.com
how can some one award such a generic patent to something that has been used by everybody else for so long?
Tweaking xml in notepad is my method, I'll take a patent on that, that patented for html or css yet?