Posted on 08/12/2009 8:43:04 AM PDT by ShadowAce
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 US 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 did not immediately reply to request for comment but said in a statement that it planned to appeal the verdict.
Toronto-based i4i sued Microsoft in March 2007 alleging that the software giant violated its 1998 patent (No 5,787,449) for a document system that eliminated the need for manually embedded formatting codes.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) 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 $200m (£120m) in the case.
In Tuesday's ruling, Microsoft was also ordered to pay an additional $40m for willful infringement, as well as $37m in pre-judgement 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.
I hate Microsoft Word. It is full of quirks. The way it handles styles is bizarre. Options for bullets and outlines are not all presented in the menus. I get documents from other people which have bullets or outline structures which are not available on my menu. You just have to know where things are hidden, in the most bizarre locations. And it is almost impossible, unless you are a “power user” to figure out how to make adjustments to formatting in a document someone else has typed.
And God help you if you make a mistake that causes things to suddenly change style. You had better have saved a copy recently, because you will need to go back to it.
WordPerfect was much more intuitive. You could use “Reveal Codes” to see what the program was doing behind the scenes. Word has a feature like that, but it only reveals about half of what it is doing. It keeps the rest secret.
Open Office works great for many users. It’s when you get into advanced formatting - especially legal formatting - that you find incompatibilities including the inability to open some Word ‘07 docx files.
LOL!!! too funny
YMMMV, but I've used both versions and strongly dislike 07.
Try Google docs. It's free and you can access your files from any computer. There is nothing to download or install. The application works in your web browser. All you need is a Google account.
I’ll second Office 2007 being unusable, but mainly because it’s S L O W .
As far as the new menu thing, It’s okay once you learn the new place for all the stuff.
BTW, Microsoft Office 2008 is very popular for the Mac.
People sue in Tyler because the judges like to push cases through fast and the juries are complete idiots.
Very funny, but I do think the ribbon is extremely clunky and awkward to use. I don't care for it all. I would prefer a simpler interface without so much visual bloat.
He may have been thinking XML's ancestor, GML, which has been around since the 60s.
Worse yet XML was created (well its predecessor SGML) with the express purpose of enabling the descriptive and customized tagging of content and metadata in a document to provide a readable and understandable structure for the document.
Crazy to think that someone can take a key feature of an open standard that was developed openly and by many participating parties and companies, and then patent a “use” of that standard for which the standard was clearly and explicitly designed to do.
Sorry to say Texan, but over the last six years the Eastern District Court of Texas has grown to be the patent trolling capital of the country due to fast judges and dumb juries. Tyler is one of the three cities where these cases are usually tried.
That area is so popular an owner of a patent who never plans to make anything with it will get with a lawyer, set up a shell company in Tyler or Marshall, assign it the patent, then sue everybody and their mother using the shell company. That way if they lose big-time they have nothing to lose but the fake shell company and the now worthless patent.
As the granddaddy of markup languages, SGML has been around since the early 1980s. XML is a subset of SGML and was created in the late 1990s. The suite is not about XML per se, but rather the custom XML tags that Microsoft uses.
If you write a book and copyright it, and then I publish your book without giving your royalties, you could sue me. You couldn't sue me because you claim to have a copyright on the English language. But you could sue me for the work created in that language. i4i claims that MS is using specialized tags written in XML that i4i has a patent on.
Theft by receiving? Dunno.
But isn't XML like the cornerstone of the latest generation of Microsoft Office/Word (both Windows and Mac platforms)? This is nuts.
"Now my story begins in Nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" because the Kaiser had stolen the wold "twenty". I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles."
Thank you. I will try it.
I have fond memories of WordStar. I sued that for over a decade. I wrote all my letters with it, and did all of my invoicing with it.
When writing papers for my Master's work (still in progress), I still have that same problem - and it doesn't matter if I am using the Mac version of Office (2008), or the Windows version (2007) - that one issue is the biggest frustration I have had writing even significant submissions - try putting the page numbers where Terabian says to put them... go ahead... have fun.
Amen, brother!!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.