
Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word - kgrin
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091222/ap_on_bi_ge/us_microsoft_patent
======
riferguson
I have absolutely no opinion about the validity of this particular patent, but
I want to forestall a bunch of random griping.

Please, please don't post commentary that involves "just reading the patent"
and thinking (a) you know what it means, or (b) saying that it's "obvious"
from a cursory glance.

All patents need to be interpreted in light of their "file history", which is
the correspondence between the Patent Office and the filer during the patent
examination. It is literally true that the words in the text may not mean what
you think they do.

It is not uncommon for patent claims to be completely changed by the file
history, which in complex cases can comprise thousands of pages of back and
forth; if you pay the copying costs you can get the patent office to send you
the file for any particular patent.

If a patent has been litigated, you may be able to figure out what the court
and the original patent examiner thought the patent meant by reading the
lawsuit filings and judgement, but just looking at the patent by itself is not
necessarily going to help you understand the details.

[IANAL, but I've been to the rodeo before.]

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cookiecaper
This is good. We need more of these things to happen so that we can get some
power behind the anti-software-patent lobby. Software patents have to become
too dangerous to keep around, and that happens by things like this; right now,
Microsoft and others use patents to lord over Linux and make vague threats
about litigation. This is an important part of Microsoft's strategy, so
software patents are important to them. But if more awesome things like making
it illegal to sell Word and therefore Office happen, it'll be too dangerous to
keep software patents around, MS will call up their cronies in Congress, and
software patents will be out of commission in a year or less.

I hope all the patent trolls of the world open the floodgates on Microsoft,
Apple, and the other behemoths in the computer industry so that we can finally
put the issue to rest.

~~~
cloudkj
I'd argue that, rather than banning software patents outright, the process by
which these patents are approved should be put under high scrutiny and
changed. For a lot of large companies, the approach really is similar to
throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. Having gone
through the process recently, I'm amazed at how easy it is for an engineer to
conceive an idea, pitch it to a few paralegals and lawyers, and get it written
up to submit to the USPTO. IMHO, there's a big disconnect between the
engineering minds that actually come up with legitimate patentable ideas and
the IP attorneys that write and file the patents.

Getting rid of software patents altogether is quite extreme. You need a
mechanism in place to protect the property rights of individuals and
corporations. When there's absolutely no sense of preservation of property -
whether it be tangible or intangible - innovation and risk taking are going to
suffer.

~~~
steveklabnik
> Getting rid of software patents altogether is quite extreme.

Really? I'd think that most people in software have the opinion that there
should be no software patents at all.

It's kind of silly, frankly.

~~~
cloudkj
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for openness and transparency. But I do believe
there needs to be some level of legal rights protection, and that it's a
pretty fundamental pillar of our capitalist system.

Out of curiosity, what do you (and others) think of a patent for something
like Google's PageRank?

~~~
dantheman
What right? Copyrights & Patents are not natural in a free market; they're
government creations. Remember patents and copyright only exist to encourage
people to produce, not because you're entitled to profit from it. As of right
now there is very little in the way of evidence that patents in anyway
contribute to encouraging people to produce. Most small companies don't even
bother patenting ideas because they don't have the time or the money to.

~~~
ghshephard
"As of right now there is very little in the way of evidence that patents in
anyway contribute to encouraging people to produce."

There are untold exception to this - It's important not to throw out the baby
with the bathwater. Drug Patents, in particular, are incredibly important.
Large Pharmaceuticals spent decades and billions of dollars on developing,
trialing, and getting their new drugs approved. Why on earth would they have
any incentive to do that if, once it was approved, they didn't have a
temporary monopoly on it?

Remember - Patents are good for only a short period of time, under twenty
years in most countries, and after that it's a free for all - anyone can use
the process's and systems that were shared and documented.

With all that said - 90% of the software patents really are nothing more than
crap - usually consisting of an engineer having an idea that most of their
"skilled and educated in the arts" peers could have come up with in less than
a week's worth of work and discussion. Public-Key cryptography class patents
are few and far between.

~~~
kelnos
Somewhat hypothetical, but: how difficult is it to reverse-engineer a drug's
exact composition with only the final product (the pill/vaccine/etc. itself)?
If it's difficult enough to be economically infeasible, then patent protection
here could be replaced by simply keeping the drug a secret.

Of course, that kills the generics market, and I suspect it's not such a
difficult problem to RE a drug, but... just curious.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
They have to disclose the contents to be licensed for medical purposes.

My wife did a stint as a student with AstraZeneca (global pharma corp) they
were making "new" drugs. One thing they do is take an existing drug and try
swapping out different parts for functionally equivalent parts and run tests
to see if the drug is effective enough to warrant proper trials and check to
see if it circumvents the opposition patents.

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pvg
Patent in question -

[http://www.google.com/patents?id=y8UkAAAAEBAJ&dq=5787449](http://www.google.com/patents?id=y8UkAAAAEBAJ&dq=5787449)

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10ren
Oral argument for the Bilski appeal was heard last month - perhaps something
will come of that. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilski>

Personally, I think patent law needs a massive overhaul; but I also think that
the lone inventor should be protected - or why would anyone bother doing deep
useful work? We would then only get the deep work (of academics) and the user-
driven hill-climbing (of open source/big corporations).

I guess startups like Appjet (etherpad) are an exception... but, according to
their early webpage, they had a software patent. Which Google may have wanted
when it acquired them. I expect that Dropbox, which also has some cool
proprietary technology, also sought to patent it, given pg's position
<http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html>

While a startup can protect itself by growing and innovating fast, I have a
soft spot for the deep technical innovator. I appreciate those incremental
hill-climbing innovations; the cool stuff in the labs that never actually
becomes usable; and the clever identification of markets and exploitation
thereof. But the revolutionary stuff is what I love.

I'm always surprised that so many developers, who I would think are creative
types, don't think deep innovation deserves the encouragement and reward of
protection.

Note that Xerox PARC was funded by patents (on xerography); and Bell Labs'
origin can be traced to a patent (on telephony).

------
coffeemug
Meanwhile, the judge's decision was written in Microsoft Word (do lawyers
still use Word Perfect?) May be Microsoft _should_ stop selling Windows and
Office in a couple of these jurisdictions. For serious document processing
there still is no good alternative to Microsoft Office. I have a feeling that
if this were to happen, the public would be losing a lot more than Microsoft
itself.

~~~
jrockway
OO.org Writer is adequate for 90% of Word's users.

I wrote a book a few years ago, and the editors used Word. Corresponding with
them by using OO.org was not too difficult; all the features were there,
although not completely polished. I looked at the features I thought were
unpolished a few years ago again recently (I am not a big word processor fan),
and they are fine now. OO.org Writer is now basically Word without Exchange
integration.

~~~
Eliezer
OO.org Writer will be adequate as soon as they come out with a decent Outline
view. Until then, I and a whole whack of other people are staying on XP rather
than Ubuntu _primarily_ because OO.org lacks this one feature!

<http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3959>

~~~
jrockway
If it's such a big issue, why not implement it yourself? Then you and a whole
whack of other people can switch from XP to Ubuntu!

~~~
assemble
Have you considered that maybe they aren't a programmer and don't have the
technical knowledge to add a feature like that? This kind of attitude is one
of the things that drives people away from Linux and the open-source movement
in general.

Personally: every time I use OO, I'm reminded of how much better Word is--in
interface (the ribbon is GREAT), features (everything you could ever need),
compatibility (you can save in PDF), etc.

~~~
jrockway
_This kind of attitude is one of the things that drives people away from Linux
and the open-source movement in general._

Sorry, but it's just the reality. Very few people write Free Software out of
pure altruism. They write it because they have a problem they need to solve.
Often there is personal gain in sharing this solution with the world
(reputation, free bugfixes, etc.), so people do. This is the open source /
free software movement in a nutshell.

If this attitude drives you away from getting something for free, then I guess
that's too bad. The community only benefits marginally from consumers; it
benefits from producers. If you are never willing to produce, the community
can probably live without you.

~~~
assemble
Somebody has to consume your product or there is no reason to build it. If OO
wants to compete with a high-quality commercial product, they should act like
it. I use Windows and Office because they are superior products, with enough
of a quality increase that I'm willing to pay for it. I really doubt people
would mind shelling out their hard earned cash for Desktop Linux or OO if they
were viable alternatives, but as it stands: they aren't.

I'm fine with being a producer in a few of the fields I care about (I work on
one of the few remaining Perl BBSes), when I'm not busy getting paid to write
software. I don't want to have to help write my OS, my Office software, my
text editor(s), my web browser, my music player, etc. I just want these things
to work in (at least) a predictable fashion.

Anyway, I really do think that the open source community needs to lose the
attitude if they ever want to gain traction in the wider non-programmer
community.

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og1
I don't understand how much of anything dealing with XML can fall within the
"non-obviousness" requirement of a patent. Who fills these juries for the
trial? From the view of the general public I think the majority of things
dealing with computers would be considered "non-obvious, and would therefore
be worthless. Why aren't these decisions being made by professional peers?

~~~
grellas
This is a classic forum shopping case brought by a Canadian company against an
international company headquartered in Seattle, with neither company having
any connection whatever with the venue (Eastern District of Texas) other than
that MS Word happens to be sold there.

This particular district is famous for being wildly receptive to patent claims
and is therefore used routinely by patent trolls searching for large verdicts
and, indeed, a $240M verdict (plus add-on items totaling $50M), plus a
permanent injunction, is a pretty big prize for "custom XML" technology that
constitutes a very minor part of Word's functionality.

Not that there isn't a form of justice in Microsoft being bitten by patent
abuses when it has benefited for years from patent abuses that it has heaped
upon others.

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wayne
Microsoft's plan is to remove the feature from Office:
[http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-22sta...](http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-22statement.mspx)

------
ars
Previous discussion on this, with more details
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757504>

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chrischen
So what did Microsoft do? Violate a patent for a "program which let's users
type and format text"?

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NathanKP
The Yahoo news item is rather trite. Is there a link to a better story with
more information about the patent that was infringed upon?

Edit: Nevermind, someone else already posted a better link. I propose that the
item link should be updated though.

~~~
houseabsolute
"Rather trite" is rather trite.

------
rayvega
Anyone know the specifics on what patent violation entails?

~~~
vaporstun
In this particular instance it was literal infringement meaning Microsoft
literally copied i4i's patented technology.

First of all, i4i is not a patent troll, they are a document management
company that actively deploys the technology on which they have a patent. One
notable case of such is that they used it to overhaul the USPTO's own internal
database.

Microsoft came to i4i and contracted them to help them move Word over to an
XML format. They then tried to strong arm i4i into some licensing agreement
which they did not accept so Microsoft just decided to willfully infringe.
This means they decided they would just ignore the patent and use i4i's
patented technology anyway without paying them. Essentially, they stole i4i's
work when they refused to sell on Microsoft's terms.

More of the backstory in this article:
[http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/i4i-says-
micro...](http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/i4i-says-microsoft-
went-behind-its-back-in-word-patent-tiff.ars)

~~~
roc
They might be an honest, hard-working group of good people who got tricked and
steamrolled by their business partner (Microsoft).

But their patent is still crap.

The first claim of the '449 patent covers essentially any code that maps
external XML data into a document. There is simply too much existing art in
the file manipulation and database domains for this to be anything _but_
obvious.

~~~
algorias
> But their patent is still crap.

No, the law is broken. What were they supposed to do, sit idle while someone
else got the patent instead?

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dangrossman
Office/Word won't drop off store shelves for any period of time. In the months
since this case was initially filed and the injunction granted, Microsoft
rewrote the small bit of Word code the company claims infringes to no longer
use that method. They reprinted the Office CDs, repackaged and are shipping
out new copies to be on shelves before the day the injunction ends.

------
viggity
Here is more information on the dispute from the register:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/22/microsoft_loses_word...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/22/microsoft_loses_word_patent_appeal/)

~~~
josefresco
"won by Toronto-based software company i4i in Texas"

Says it all.

------
bioweek
Why is MSFT stock up for the day and for the week? Shouldn't this majorly
affect their revenue?

~~~
nostrademons
The stock is supposed to reflect the discounted value of _all_ future cash
flows. In the grand scheme of Microsoft's Infinite Revenue Machine, having
Word off the market for a month or so while they figure out a workaround
really doesn't make much of a dent.

~~~
bioweek
So no one is worried it will be off the market permanently? I thought
investors were prone to panic?

~~~
ispivey
No; other people read the article, and have heard the news that Microsoft
plans to have a modified (compliant) version for sale as soon as this
injunction takes effect.

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drawkbox
Sad thing about this is there is some developers at Microsoft right now
working on this, for as many possible hours per day all through the holiday
just to fix and remove the features. They couldn't have waited until January
4th to drop this?

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10ren
Some insightful comments on slashdot (browsing at 5):
[http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/22/1936214/Microsoft-
Ord...](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/22/1936214/Microsoft-Ordered-To-
Pay-290M-Stop-Selling-Word)

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manish
"Microsoft has said that it and the public will both suffer if Word goes off
the market while the company devises a workaround."

I am touched by Microsoft's concern for public.

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sev
Google's acquisition of DocVerse is starting to make more and more sense.

