Microsoft banned from selling Word
nessuno
It sounds like a joke. But, it's real and it's anything but a joke for
Microsoft...
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....
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....
Now, I am not a lawyer, but I know something about IP law and a fair
amount about markup languages...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.
</Quote>
http://blogs.computerworld.com/14532/microsoft_banned_from_selling_word
Moshe Goldfarb
> <Quote>
> It sounds like a joke. But, it's real and it's anything but a joke for
> Microsoft...
Are you in a time warp or something?
I've noticed you always seem to be last......
Ezekiel
"Moshe Goldfarb" <mosheg...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:h5usi1$gn8$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
Little John Nessuno continues to deliver "Yesterdays news tomorrow"