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Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

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Re: Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

#81

Post by jrockway »

coffeemug wrote: post #29

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.

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.

Re: Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

#82

Post by wheels »

pyre wrote: post #70
wheels wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> show me a single software patent that a competent programmer couldn't develop in a few weeks given the description. MP3.

IIRC, MPEG Layer-III isn't a single patent. So it's a bit of a misnomer to say that 'MP3' is a patent that a competent programmer couldn't come up with on their own. On the other hand, I've heard some audio people say that MP3 wasn't necessarily anything 'new' to audio engineers/producers. It was just translating into software what people in the business already knew.

It certainly was new to audio engineers and producers. It wasn't wholly new to researchers in the field of psycho-acoustic compression, but then, there's rarely much that is new for the inner circle of researchers in a field.

Re: Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

#83

Post by Eliezer »

jrockway wrote: post #81
coffeemug wrote: post #29

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.

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 withou…

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

Re: Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

#84

Post by dpatru »

cookiecaper wrote: post #6

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.…

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. --Abraham Lincoln

Re: Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

#85

Post by kiba »

cloudkj wrote: post #25
cookiecaper wrote: post #6

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.…

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…

This is based on your assumption that a patent system will actually result in more inventions, than it would otherwise without its existence. It is also based on the assumption that novel inventions necessary mean it should be protected in the market place because of its presumed usefulness. It also mean that you believe an invention can be judged objectivity to be obvious or not.

You also forget the enormous difficulty for reforming the patent system to the economic benefits of the masses due to regulatory capture by special interest. If you want to reform the system, you have to reform the overlying political system that allow such regulatory capture in the first place.

Secondary, I would like to direct your attention to a book called Against Intellectual Monopoly by two economists, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, who explains the evidence for why patent and copyright monopolies shouldn't exists in the first place.

Re: Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

#86

Post by algorias »

dpatru wrote: post #84
cookiecaper wrote: post #6

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.…

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. --Abraham Lincoln

What about collateral damage of such enforcement?

Re: Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

#87

Post by kiba »

NathanKP wrote: post #13
cookiecaper wrote: post #6

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.…

At the same time legitimate software patents can help to protect small software studios and startups. It is a double edged sword.

It is presumptuous to think that megacorporation have the foresight to predicts the "next big things" and react accordingly and fast enough.

They might not even want to because it will cannibalize their existing business.

There's a reason why small startup can run circles around bigger corporations all the time and it's not legal weaponry.

Re: Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

#88

Post by algorias »

roc wrote: post #22
vaporstun wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Wor…

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.

> 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?

Re: Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

#89

Post by gphil »

steveklabnik wrote: post #26
cloudkj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I'm not so sure that patents on software are any more or less "silly" than patents on real (physical) devices. What is it about software patents that makes them inherently different from patents in general? Obviously, there are arguments for and against the patent system as a whole, but are there any that apply only to software patents?

I know there's a rich tradition of objecting to patents on software, but it always strikes me as odd that people think that software is some kind of exception, and that other patents are OK.

Re: Court: Microsoft violated patent; can't sell Word

#90

Post by lsb »

algorias wrote: post #86
dpatru wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. --Abraham Lincoln

What about collateral damage of such enforcement?

Microsoft will do everything in its power to make sure it can sell Office. They have tens of billions of dollars to ensure that this doesn't happen.
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