Judge orders Microsoft to stop selling Word
A judge on Tuesday ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word, one of its premier products, in its current form due to patent infringement.
Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML," according to a statement released by attorneys for the plantiff, i4i.
Microsoft said it was disappointed in the ruling and that it would appeal the verdict.
"We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid," Microsoft spokesperson Kevin Kutz said in a statement.
Toronto-based i4i sued Microsoft in March 2007 alleging that the Redmond,Wash.-based software giant violated its 1998 patent (No. 5,787,449) for a document system that eliminated the need for manually embedded formatting codes.
XML--an integral feature in Microsoft Word--is considered a "page description language," with one of its key qualities being that it is readable by people, not just machines. Unlike HTML, which has predefined tags, XML allows developers and users to define their own tags for data, such as price and product.
In May, a federal jury in Tyler, Texas, ruled that the custom XML tagging features of Word 2003 and Word 2007 infringed on i4i's patent and ordered Microsoft to pay $200 million in the case.
In Tuesday's ruling, Microsoft was also ordered to pay an additional $40 million for willful infringement, as well as $37 million in prejudgment interest. The order requires Microsoft to comply with the injunction within 60 days and forbids Microsoft from testing, demonstrating, or marketing Word products containing the contested XML feature.
However, it's unlikely Microsoft will take one of its biggest money-makers off the market. The injunction gives Redmond two months to pursue an appeal, craft a settlement, or implement a technical workaround that removes the technology found to be infringing.
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. Before joining CNET News in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers. E-mail Steven. 
Software patent is a system that shift the money from software industry to lawyers. It is like the goverment will have a new tax on software industry and use it to fund welfare for the leagal industry. (perhaps the lawyers in America are too poor, and need a free gourmet meal once a while?)
I4I the company had the world recognized top system out there for XML implementation and management in large scale companies and was the chosen to power such things as the, and this is ironic, the US patent system, the FDA's new streamlined submission system, which uses a open standard chiefly developed from two companies technologies, i4i being one of them.
While i do not usually condone these lawsuits. MS in this case realized that its efforts to avoid using XML were going against corporate customer demands, pretty much just took the best system available from a third party for this purpose and almost straight up incorporated it into word. I read quite a few articles on this when they talked about it earlier this year. And you have to remember that XML is common use now, but this was started years ago when it was not common in actual use and this companies solution was more than just a save to XML function, it was not an easy accomplishment like some of you would pretend it was.
This company made its fortune on servicing the majority of the fortune 500 companies, many of them software giants, as well as many government agencies.
1. The injunction is just a normal part of the court proceedings. Microsoft will appeal the original verdict, and it's almost certain that the Appeals court will stay the injunction until the appeal is resolved (which could take many many years).
2. To elaborate, in order for the injunction to stand, i4i must demonstrate "irreparable harm" if Microsoft continues to sell Word. But there is no such irreparable harm, since the courts can simply factor-in additional amounts Microsoft must pay should they eventually lose the appeal.
3. I've read the patent but have not read the court decision itself. From the patent, this case is more complex than simply using XML or tacking on style-sheets (like CSS). The heart of the matter is really about external indexed metadata. Style-sheets are different because they still require structures (tags) within the content.
4. I believe typically on appeal, new facts aren't considered, so the court will only look at mostly procedural matters. That means Microsoft can't win the appeal unless the patent is invalidated (which is a separate process than the appeals process). So we'll likely see two battles being fought: one in the courts and another within the patent system.
5. At this point I believe the patent will (eventually) be invalidated. So the question is what is the "prior art". I believe there are prior arts in the multimedia processing world (audio / image / video) which are analogous enough in nature to invalidate this patent.
6. Both sides may consider settling on appeals. Even if you add up the $200 million from the original verdict plus the additional damages the judge tacked on, for Microsoft that's still less than a week's worth of profit. I mean, think about that. If they think they're going to lose the appeal, Microsoft will just license the technology for say $100 mil (sorry, "an undisclosed amount") which i4i will happily take.
7. The final problem is this use of metadata is pervasive. I bet companies like Adobe and Apple are following at this case very closely, maybe also Oracle/Sun since some of their Java code might infringe as well.
Microsoft gets hit by these types of suits all the time, from people who want to get rich quick.
Take for example: you build a web browser or a multimedia player. Just because they may use Ogg Theora does not mean that you cannot patent/copyright some feature of the overall package, like a new way to stream it to your computer in a new way that uses less bandwidth and resources to generate a higher quality and resolution image than everyone else is using.
(I'm not saying that what he did back then was right, just that it's not directly analogous with what's going on today. In any event, isn't Gates retired from the company?)
Thank you for providing a thought-out and insightful opine about the article, comment and facts. It's nice to see things like this (intelligence) occasionally when the comments are generally filled with trolling.
(and if a certain district court in East Texas were ordered to close its doors tomorrow morning, I'm certain the entire frickin' IT industry would break out in one gigantic spontaneous party...)
I wonder just how much more they can take, from court losses to ever gradually declining marketshare.
Congress made these statutes of limitations VERY strict in order to keep patent trolls from sitting on a patent and then trying to sue people once those other people made a successful product.
First of all, this is a PATENT case, not a COPYRIGHT case. Normally the statute of limitations for a civil PATENT enforcement suit is six years.
Secondly, even if it were a COPYRIGHT case, the statute of limitations for civil action is 3 years after "the last act of infringement" (five years for criminal). I.e., if a party is infringing from 2003 until the present, then the statute of limitations hasn't run out yet (and wont run out until 3 years after the party stops infringing).
These lawsuits against Microsoft are becoming ridiculous and I think these small courts judge against Microsoft for spite instead of reality.
I'd like the courts to realize what they have just asked Microsoft to do and how it will affect way more than just Microsoft.
It sounds to me that the patent as granted was too broad, or shouldn't have been granted at all, but I'd have to read the patent and case minutes to be sure.
I was working on standards committees for using SGML back in the late 80s, and as you say XML is basically an update to SGML. The big problem was that SGML was a content description language, not a page description language, and people have been trying to wedge page description into it since the beginning, just as they later tried to do with HTML (which is why CSS was developed.) I gather the standards folks tried to make it easier to do with XML than its predecessors. But certainly there's no new fundamental concept here - the most they could have infringed would have been implementation details. I smell patent trolls.
We have people using word 2007 and its hard enough already dealing with the incompatability problems that users run into when they receive a docx file etc. MS has really underestimated the frustration level of all this crap because a lot of Attorneys and Judges use Office and I bet thay are very familiar with these annoyances. lol MS.
This is one of the more common sense rulings I've ever read. You want to know what nightmares happen when there are no standards? Go try and deal with RFID and RFID printer labels. What a joke.
whe using custom tags? Isnt that part of the whole purpose of XML?
here is a good compromise that i do think is fair, patents should not be awarded for hypothetical products. products should appear at least in prototype within 12 months of the application in my view.
totally eliminating patents? unwise...
eliminating vaporware patents... reasonable.
This case involves a real company that made a real product that was at the time this patent was filed recognized as the top program of its type that was period. A quick search on the company and the back story to this lawsuit will turn up all kinds of stories about this company and how they were on a rocket ride to the top in this area of XML document storage and office interoperability and won contract after contract with government agencies from (ironically) the US Patent Office (largest single purchase of software licenses in history at the time) to run on 30,000 machines in their office, to the FDA, the Smithsonian, etc. To this day almost all major pharmaceutical companies use their licensed technologies or software packages for interacting with the FDA when submitting documents.
I usually would be speaking out myself about all this being a waste of time and the court system, but after reading a few articles on it earlier this year when they won $200 million from a jury when they themselves asked for $25 million, i found that this company is only after what they considered fair which is MS paying licensing fees for the IP that they used.
That's what copyright is for. I suggest learning the diff before selling your "code".
"ok sure... so someone can steal my code and re-sell them as their own. "
Seems you are confusing patents and copyright.
You can NOT patent code. You can only copyright it.
Please educate yourself about these things.
Get rid of this stupid piecemeal software patents... problem solved!
And you are the authority on this???
May I suggest learning patent law before posting?
No, these appeals do not take years... usually. And the injunction order normally will be suspended when the higher court agrees to hear the case.
@JoeF2
Lerianis3 is right you twit. Maybe you should learn something about XML before you post. the XML standard has this implementation in mind for unlimited possible uses. How can you patent a feature of a technical standard developed prior to the patent and based on another technical standard developed 20 years before that? The patent is obviously invalid and never should have been issued as it attempts to take ownership of any Markup Language ever created, ALL of them before the patent was issued!
No, these appeals do not take years... usually. And the injunction order normally will be suspended when the higher court agrees to hear the case.
@JoeF2
Lerianis3 is right you twit. Maybe you should learn something about XML before you post. the XML standard has this implementation in mind for unlimited possible uses. How can you patent a feature of a technical standard developed prior to the patent and based on another technical standard developed 20 years before that? The patent is obviously invalid and never should have been issued as it attempts to take ownership of any Markup Language ever created, ALL of them before the patent was issued!
No, these appeals do not take years... usually. And the injunction order normally will be suspended when the higher court agrees to hear the case.
@JoeF2
Lerianis3 is right you twit. Maybe you should learn something about XML before you post. the XML standard has this implementation in mind for unlimited possible uses. How can you patent a feature of a technical standard developed prior to the patent and based on another technical standard developed 20 years before that? The patent is obviously invalid and never should have been issued as it attempts to take ownership of any Markup Language ever created, ALL of them before the patent was issued!
I give the "twit" right back to you.
This is not a patent about XML, it is about the use of XML in a certain environment.
Now,t he patent may or may not be valid, but neither you twit nor Leranis are qualified to judge that.
Now crawl back into your hole, troll.
Microsoft has 60 days to convince them to stay the injunction.
If they do not, then the injunction stands for the duration (years - at least 1.5 as IP lawsuits go), and somebody will have to launch a crash program to do a major rewrite on their product's codebase, just in order to continue selling said product.
Use typing machine? LOL
This is the reason why the Supreme Court needs to clamp down on these patent trolls and put some of them in jail, for bringing frivolous lawsuits.
It is not being a Patent Troll to protect the R&D that you did to come up with a product that at the time nobody else was offering and a lot of big name customers were licensing. The courts should most definitely protect developers from having their works used by others for profit without compensation. If it not ok for these people to get payed for the processes they developed, then there is nothing wrong with me,for example just duplicating any licensed IP from MS, Adobe, etc and just using it at will. People want to say nothing in software should be protected by patents but who exactly would create anything new if it was not.
Actually, it doesn't. This only involves XML usage; OOo Writer uses ODF-based formats and the pre-XML MS Word format.
IOW, the XML-based format in contention = .docx, not .doc
> nope... use all the word processing apps available for free or donation...
As long as they use proprietary document formats and don't use XML...
One patch later, and that's no longer a problem.
OpenOffice does in fact support Office XML files.
It's about the implementation of a Word-specific external data mapping feature called "Custom XML", but the use XML here is of secondary importance. Had Microsoft implemented this mapping feature using CSV, they'd still be infringing.
The $200 million question is whether anyone can now find prior art to this patent. My own belief is this patent should be invalidated, but obviously so far Microsoft hasn't been able to come up with a convincing prior art.
If i4i is based in Toronto, Ontario and Microsoft is based in Redmond, Washington, why is this bearing heard in Texas? It should be heard in the 9th circuit where Microsoft and the alleged infringement took place.
But what is Texas? Favorable to patent trolls.
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas may or may not be plaintiff friendly, but consider that: 1) Microsoft could have filed a motion to move the proceedings to another jurisdiction if it wanted to; and 2) the same court (indeed the very same judge) has granted favorable rulings to Microsoft on previous patent cases, including a summary motion to dismiss a different patent case earlier this year.
- by wigmo August 12, 2009 5:40 AM PDT
- If Microsoft is infringing on this patent, then so are a lot of us.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- by drfrost August 14, 2009 10:39 AM PDT
- That's because it doesn't pass the "obvious to someone reasonably skilled in the art" test.
- Like this
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Showing 1 of 4 pages (152 Comments)Software patents were one of the worst ideas of recent history.