I'm definitely confused by that statement and its link, because it implies the relevant tool is the disk format for every Office file, which has been described by an Excel program manager as "complicated enough to reduce a grown programmer to tears." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
See https://www.zdnet.com/article/custom-xml-the-key-to-patent-s...
(edit: grammar)
Does it imply that?
Another commenter has already pointed out why it's likely not the case.
But also, I don't think the article is well written. Partly because it doesn't clearly explain what the infringing tool was, or did, or how it operated. Also I'm pretty sure there's a typo in "ex part" instead of "ex parte". But another major issue is the following:
> $40 million of that judgment [against Microsoft] was imposed by the court as punishment for continually arguing that i4i was a patent troll even though it had an operating business in a manner that was “persistent, legally improper, and in direct violation of the Court's instructions.”
What?
Why would i4i operating in a manner that was persistent, improper and in violation of the court's instructions preclude it from also being a patent troll? It could do both?
Or is the "persistent..." descriptor meant to apply to Microsoft? That might make more sense, but the "even though" seems to be a comparison between two types of activity by one entity - namely i4i.
But then again, I might be reading "it had an operating business in a manner" wrong, because it feels ungrammatical to me. I might not be putting the emphasis in the right place, and that's what's causing me to misread the sentence?
The whole thing just feels confusing.
> attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art
> often do not manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question
Looking back at it again now, I can see the intent of the original sentence where "it had an operating business" refers to i4i, but "in a manner that was..." refers to Microsoft. I didn't get the change of subject at that point.
Maybe an additional comma would have been all that I needed to figure it out: "even though it had an operating business, in a manner that was..."
1) it has never been removed, afaik Word still uses OOXML, so Word would keep being infringing
2) LibreOffice would probably be infringing too, as ODF is also XML based
So... it has to be some other form of XML tool and not the file format.
As for Joel's comment, IIRC he was an Excel PM before OOXML; in any case his blog post refer to the binary format that precedes OOXML. I'm pretty sure OOXML is equally if not even more complicated, as the product themselves are way more complicated than they appear, but the fact is that he was talking about a different thing.
Edit: as many users pointed out, it's not the file format itself, but the ability to add arbitrary attributes/elements to the file format XML as additional data.
On the backend, all .docx files use XML. Joel is saying the root XML format was difficult to work with.
What my article is about is this: Microsoft used to allow users to write their own custom XML rules on top of Word. (This was mostly app developers using XML for macros rather than end users, and overall it was very rare.) This is the feature that was at issue with the patent.
Sorry if this was not clear!
Joel wasn't writing about the XML version of MS Office documents, he was writing about the binary versions.
The patent is about representing documents with markup (XML or otherwise) not by embedding them in the text, but rather having them stripped and maintained as a separate list of (tag, position) pairs, with the document only containing the raw text.
I'm only surprised that Microsoft couldn't find prior art, because having a (content-type, address) index at the beginning of a file is not exactly an unusual representation. It also reminds me that the USPTO's idiosyncratic usage of non-obviousness doesn't really match my intuition.
I am aware of the date of the "invention". I was programming on 8- and 16-bit computers in the 1980s and I was using this and similar kinds of formats for non-textual data, simply because it was easier to do this in assembler than writing a parser, paired with the difficulty of finding unused special bytes in binary data to separate meta-information from the data proper.
And I was also talking about non-obviousness, not novelty.
If it is, it would have been really really cool.
def convert(xml):
import re
parsed = re.split(r"(<.+?>)", xml)
output = parsed[0]
tags_with_pos = []
for i in range(1, len(parsed), 2):
tags_with_pos.append((parsed[i], len(output)))
output += parsed[i+1]
return tags_with_pos, outputRemember that USPTO gets paid for each patent application, and not penalised when it's later falsified.
Programmers are notoriously good at documenting everything after all. /s
It's easy to give documentary evidence for things someone found self-evident and so only wrote a scribbled note about in a workbook 40 years ago. /s
FWIW patent law obviousness is not the same thing as ordinary notions of obviousness either.
All my personal opinion, ofc.