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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Cyber Cynic

Microsoft banned from selling Word

56 comments

TAGS:i4i, lawsuit, Microsoft, Office, patent, software patent, Word
IT TOPICS:Desktop Applications, Government & Regulation, Management, Software, Windows & Microsoft

It sounds like a joke. But, it's real and it's anything but a joke for Microsoft. Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, has issued an injunction (PDF Link) 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."

Microsoft had been sued by i4i, a collaborative content solution and technology company. Its founder, Michel Vulpe, owned a patent covering a way of reading XML (Extended Markup Language) documents. XML is the basis of Microsoft's controversial Open XML document formats. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas is infamous for supporting patent lawsuits and fast-tracking them. In intellectual property law circles, this Court has become known as "A Haven for Patent Pirates."

In this case, though, i4i isn't a patent troll. It's a real company that uses its patented technology in real products. It also believes that Microsoft has used its patent in Word. And, what's to the point, they convinced Judge Davis of this.

On May 20th 2009, Judge Davis and his court's jury ruled that Microsoft owed i4i a $200 million patent infringement verdict for having infringed on i4i's "A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformations," patent # 5787449.

Microsoft didn't settle. Boy, was that a mistake.

As lawyers who have dealt with Judge Davis before know he doesn't suffer fools lightly. So on August 11, he signed the order that blocks Microsoft from selling Word. According to the document, "This injunction becomes effective 60 days from the date of this order." So, on or about October 12th, Word, and Microsoft Office since all versions contain it, will go off store shelves.

Some people, like Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, don't think that Microsoft will have to stop Word sales. Sorry. Microsoft may very well have to stop sales or disable Open XML, Word's new standard document format. This injunction will not be easy to dodge.

Nick Eaton at SeattlePI reported that, Microsoft wants to fight this out. Eaton wrote that Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said, "We are disappointed by the court's ruling. We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid. We will appeal the verdict."

Good luck with that Microsoft. No, I'm not being sarcastic.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but I know something about IP law and a fair amount about markup languages since I've been covering them since SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), showed up in the late 1980s and before anyone had dreamed up the Web's HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or XML. To me, the i4i patent reads like a classic, over-reaching patent that covers prior art, which should have prevented it from ever becoming a patent. It's these kinds of patents, and courts like the Eastern District of Texas, which approve these IP patent lawsuits almost as a reflex, which harms everyone in the technology business.

As anyone who reads my stuff knows, I'm no fan of Microsoft. I also think Open XML is a junk standard. But, that said, while Microsoft's legal team certainly mishandled this case so far, Microsoft doesn't deserve this kind of punishment for this particular misdeed.

This time it's Microsoft's turn to be bashed, but next time it may be an open-source company, or your company. Many big technology companies pay up to patent pirates, and while i4i isn't one of those and Microsoft talks big now, they may well end up paying up. U.S. patent law and enforcement has become a disgrace, and each such 'victory' drives up the cost of technology for all of us and makes real innovation ever harder to achieve.

Related Posts:

IT Blogwatch: You can't buy MS Word: i4i XML patent ruling
Preston Gralla: Microsoft Word ban: It's time to banish patent lawyers

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This article should have

Submitted by Anonymous on December 26, 2009 - 8:31 A.M.

This article should have been subtitled "A case for the (.doc)X files"

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As noted, the patent

Submitted by Michael Wasserman on August 13, 2009 - 4:57 P.M.

As noted, the patent describes separating markup from the content stream by means of an map indexing the content. Such a method was used as early as the 1960s in Format for Bibliographic Information Interchange on Magnetic Tape (ISO 2709/ANSI Z39.2) and implemented by the Library of Congress as MARC (still in use as MARC21). The standard depends on a "directory" that maps "field tags" to their corresponding "variable fields" in the body of the record by giving the starting position of the field and its length. This obvious method of separating markup and content was in use long before i4i even dreamt of patenting it.

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What i4i's patent does

Submitted by James D. Mason on August 13, 2009 - 1:39 P.M.

As several of us who have read the patent have concluded, what the patent does is describe a method of doing stand-off markup, which is linearized into SGML/XML on export. That is to say, i4i's product appears to allow editing in Word, using the normal interface, while maintaining a map of pointers into the file that shows where XML markup should be inserted. Only on export is the XML merged into the linearized text stream.

Many of those of us who have been around the markup community have been aware of i4i's product since long before Microsoft decided to do its own XML, even if we became aware of the patent only recently. I have in other contexts defended i4i from being a patent troll because they have long had a product working on these principles, and I have a certain sympathy with them because their business seems to have been overwhelmed by Microsoft.

However, this technique did not originate with i4i. It was already established in other commercial products and was, in effect, standardized in ISO/IEC 8613, Office Document Architecture. ODA essentially described a binary format for word-processor document representation, which worked by pointers into a byte stream. Its original interchange format, ODIF, started as a representation of that structure, but it was extended to have an alternative SGML stream, exported by a process similar to that described in the i4i patent. So there was prior art, specifically prior art described in public standards.

(Just for reference, I spent 22 years as the chairman of what is now ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34. SC34 is the committee that standardized SGML in the 1980s and now is responsible for both ODF, supported by many open-source products, and OOXML, the XML released by Microsoft in response to ODF. Neither ODF nor OOXML has anything to do with ODA/ODIF, which have been dormant since the turn of the current century but were still under development in the 1990s in a committee that was parallel to the one that became SC34.)

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what goes around comes around

Submitted by Ulysses on August 13, 2009 - 10:04 A.M.

"The cost of doing business?" Microsoft could very well afford being sued every quarter, but Microsoft's hands are not clean. They return the favor by their patents that no one has seen. So, what goes around comes around. Call it Karma or whatever. I don't particularly like patent trolls and they are quite a few in technology.

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I'm glad to see that at

Submitted by Anonymous on August 13, 2009 - 6:46 A.M.

I'm glad to see that at least Microsoft (not always my favorite company) is trying to stand up against those evil patent pirates. We need to get all the software developers together and get something done about our horribly broken patent process. People with legitimate new inventions can't afford to get and defend their patents, while other companies keep patenting obvious/prior art and then successfully use it as a weapon against others.

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How is i4i NOT a patent

Submitted by Anonymous on August 13, 2009 - 6:30 A.M.

How is i4i NOT a patent pirate? In my book they certainly are. Perhaps they don't go around purchasing patents from others with the intent of suing, but they did patent something that a patent never should have been granted on (anyone with any IT clue would NEVER have expected that patent to stand up)!

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Wait, did they just patent CSS

Submitted by Yeshua Watson on August 13, 2009 - 12:50 A.M.

Correct Me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this patent apply to ANY system that separates the formatting from actual document? If this is the case, then using linked CSS files to format html pages would apply here also. The CSS would have to be included in the HTML; killing virtual all sites and CRMs on the net located in the US.

And I'm pretty sure linking Css files existed well before Word 2003.

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Nope

Submitted by TGM on August 13, 2009 - 6:48 A.M.

CSS is not an XML based formatting system. From what I gather with this patent the formatting is applied using an XML file. Where this puts XSLT files I'm not so sure though...

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You're right...

Submitted by Yeshua Watson on August 13, 2009 - 2:26 P.M.

XSLT is based on XML, used to manipulate XML and/or plain text documents. This patent specifically states separating the text content from the instruction set for formatting. The patent even references that the content could contain metatags or be a raw page as long as the two documents are separate. If the patent is upheld, then XSLT is at risk too.

However, CSS is a language that provides the same functionality, giving Redmond an alternative to work with. Although not as structured, CSS does provide a way to manipulate several documents, but would require the content to retain the metatags. To work around that, an index file could be used to count the characters to locate the text needing manipulating. This would result in three files, but work around the patent while providing the same functionality.

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Yep

Submitted by Tony on August 13, 2009 - 11:18 A.M.

First, according to what I've read on the patent, it does not just cover the separation of form and content in XML documents, but in all documents.

Second, even if the scope is limited to XML, the patent as described covers things like DTDs, XSD, and XSL.

As far as I can tell, the patent is invalid. It may be upheld, Microsoft may pay up, and the patent holder may never try to enforce it again, perhaps making them the Robin Hoods of the patent world. But as far as I can tell (and I'm NOT a patent attorney) the patent covers things that existed before the patent was issued, and cover the work of people who were not in any way affiliated with the company holding the patent.

Furthermore, you can't patent the idea of doing something, only a specific way of doing it. If they had for example come up with a specific way of separating format from content, such as their own proprietary alternative to XSD, and then Microsoft used that format to specify their document schema, they might have a case. It's like the difference between patenting the automobile, and patenting the idea of using any mechanical form of conveyance to get from one place to another.

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