"Easy Work-Around" For Microsoft Word's Legal Woes 172
CWmike writes "Microsoft can likely use an 'easy technical work-around' to sidestep a recent injunction by a Texas federal judge that bars the company from selling Word, a patent attorney said today. 'The injunction doesn't apply to existing product that has already been sold,' said Barry Negrin, a partner with the New York firm Pryor Cashman LLP who has practiced patent and trademark law for 17 years. 'Headlines that say Microsoft can't sell Word are not really true,' said Negrin, pointing out that the injunction granted by US District Court Judge Leonard Davis on Tuesday only prohibits Microsoft from selling Word as it exists now after Oct. 10. 'All Microsoft has to do is disable the custom XML feature, which should be pretty easy to do, then give that a different SKU number from what's been sold so it's easy to distinguish the two versions.'"
Re:Beware the Details (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah, removing the ooxml code is easy. Telling your customers "all of the documents you've saved since 2006 won't be readable by new installations" is the hard part. This is a non-story, we all know obviously they can take the code out, but it doesn't help their users who have docx documents.
Maybe they could offer a downloadable component like they have for old versions of Word?
Also, what does this mean for openoffice?
Right, easy.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Spoken like a true end-user. As a developer, almost every single time I've ever said something would be "easy to do" code-wise it has come back to bite me in the ass. I've learned not to use that phrase for anything, especially for things that really do seem easy to do. Now it is "I'll see what is involved in that request and get back to you." End-users always seem to think things will be easy to change. Disabling a feature in a widely used application like Word that likely has a ton of legacy code in it is probably not as easy as one might think. I'd also be skeptical about this statement considering it is coming from the opposing lawyer and not from one of MS's own engineers.
Is this guy an idiot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, doing that would make the whole Vista Ready vs. Vista Capable debacle look like a 10 dollar parking ticket. What a stupid plan.
Re:Beware the Details (Score:4, Insightful)
MS Remove Custom things from an application? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Ms got rid of the ability to add custom XML, they would never be able to Extend the specification they proposed, and so Extinguish competition while everyone else plays catch up.
Re:Good luck with that... (Score:1, Insightful)
At the time, IE was the only way to get updates for the system. I'd call that part of the OS.
Re:Thank you (Score:4, Insightful)
We all write our comments in Word. Because the Internet Explorer doesn't have a spell checker.*
* (just a guess)
Re:Beware the Details (Score:2, Insightful)
I know of an easy solution: sign a patent license agreement with the patent holder!
Re:Is this guy an idiot? (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, not the last time I used it. Word defaults to docx in it's default state. THats not to say you can't change that preference via group policy or just doing some menu digging, but out of the box it most certainly saves to docx by default
I have a better idea (Score:4, Insightful)
They could hire someone to dig through the IBM research journals and patents on the General Markup Language and its successor SGML, and find some prior art. They might even have some prior art of their own related to RTF. This patent sucks; it's on a basic technique that anyone writing a program to read a document with inline tags would at least consider, and I find it hard to believe it wasn't actually used on occasion.
Re:Good luck with that... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is this guy an idiot? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is this guy an idiot? (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF part of "all our files for the last two years are in a format the new employees can't create or modify" are you not understanding?
Re:Easy Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good luck with that... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Really... (Score:3, Insightful)
A patent troll with a PoC is still a patent troll. Looks to me like they sold a pretty simple plugin, and even made some money while doing it. Now that feature has been moved into the mainline version of word, and they worry about unfair competition.
If i4i has a better product, they have nothing to worry about. If Microsoft is interested in adding that functionality to word, then they can acquire i4i for a fair price. If neither side can agree on a fair price, then we have what is called innovation. Both sides crank out features as fast as they can, and compete for who can offer the best features for cheapest. Eventually they will agree on a fair price, and the consumers will be better off for it.
Using patents to prevent Microsoft from competing is anti-competitive.
Re:Really... (Score:5, Insightful)
Using patents to prevent Microsoft from competing is anti-competitive.
That's because patents are inherently anti-competitive. A patent is a limited-term monopoly expressly granted by the government. That's the whole idea.
And your naive and simplified free market solution is unrealistic. Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of free markets too. But they're not flawless and universally efficient. If i4i were to compete head-to-head against Microsoft, they would get crushed regardless of the quality of their product.
Fortunately for them, the USPTO has, pursuant to its statutory authority (which is well-grounded in the constitution, unlike about 90% of what the federal government does), granted them a limited monopoly. They now have the right to enforce that monopoly in the courts, which means they get a chance to compete.
The alternative is that MegaCorps get to decide every single product and service that is available to you. There would be no way for disruptive technologies to get a footing. All startups could be crushed at inception, because their ideas (the only asset where they may possibly have an edge on the MegaCorp) would be free for the taking. MegaCorp gets to decide what you can buy and what you can't (and in what form). Sounds like Utopia, huh?
Re:Really... (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a difference between blocking patents which exist primarily to make it impossible for other companies to work in an area, and patents on important processes that are genuinely being used an exploited as an end.
Re:Really... (Score:3, Insightful)
I second the idea of a property tax. If the intellectual property is worth a significant amount of money then there should be no shortage of investors willing to pay a tax for the exclusive right to benefit from that IP. Filing fees are not the right way to do it at all, though they do of course have their place as the USPTO should cover their costs to assess the patent application.
If the property tax were to go directly to the USPTO for other operational expenses they would be flush with cash and able to hire enough staffing to do the job right.
So a property tax on IP assessed annually would solve several problems.
1) it would help to fund the USPTO which is badly in need of such funding
2) it would discourage submarine patents and encourage legitimate investment
3) it would help to set the fair market value of IP for legitimate patent infringement or disputes
4) with a reduction in filing fees offered in parallel it could lower the entry price for new inventors
.
The only problem (and it's not insignificant) is how to set the value of the IP to begin with. Not every idea is valuable. OTOH why maintain a patent if the idea isn't valuable... so a minimum value would have to be set and anyone who doesn't want to pay could forfeit to the public domain. Possibly a grace period of 5 years before the minimum kicks in during which time if an offer to buy occurs and the offer amount is put into escrow the value of the IP could be set at the offered amount. The owner could then choose to hold on to the patent and start paying the tax or they could sell the the buyer. 10% may be high, 1% would be better. An offer of 10 million for a patent is not unknown and is not out of the ballpark for a deep pocket company to put into escrow.
If the patent is that valuable the owner should have no problems getting investment to pay for the tax and help to monetize if they choose to do so.
If the offer is much less say $100,000 then a tax of $1000 per year is not so much that you'd need investment and if planning to monetize should be able to afford.
If the offer is in between, you have a legitimate valuation of your IP that should get you a bank loan or angel investors interest.
I don't see any pitfalls here.