shilling for nonsense.

Actually, chestmat, Vulpe and Owen are the inventors of record on the patent. Vulpe is the FOUNDER of i4i, and Owen is his business partner. So do try to stop being such lying little Microsoft shill would you?

They did "invent" it, as much as you can "invent" a product that is (1) mathematics and (2) discovered, not invented. But hey, if the patent system is going to be fundamentally broken, might as well target those who are most in favour of the direction its broken in, to the point of lobbying hard for it to continue being broken.

Since the system is broken anyway

Might as well see the broken patents system turned against some of the biggest supporters of keeping it broken for their own benefit.

Petard, hoisted, etc.

Undecided?

So, you'd rather have a world where you could make a handy dandy wee program that you were making oodles of money from, and then along comes Microsoft/Apple/Oracle/Whoever and says, dang that's sweet, and hijacks your unpatented work and includes it "for free" in their product range thereby boosting their sales and removing your earnings?

re: Undecided?

Patents are not licences. And whether you close your source or even leave it open, who says that licences don't protect you at least as well as patents do?

In many cases, especially with intangible goods, alternatives to patents may be more transparent and beneficial to innovation ... and money making.

Trevor Pott o_O

But the problem is this is not an obvious idea that i4i came up with and others went why didn't I think of that.

This is an idea which had been implemented as the basis of most of our technologies is so common place every one else had avoided patenting.

i4i might have produced a legitimate product but patenting the ability to store context specific information in a separate file is just plain patient trolling..

All websites that use DTDs (but not css's because the patient is limited to xml).

All webservices.

All editing documents that use dtds.

All applications that use xlsts for transformation.

I admit this was once new and previously unconceived. As was the wheel, word processing, the number zero, chaos theory, evolution, the fact the earth was round and declarative programming (which is essentially what is being patented all be it with xml). That doesn't mean if someone successful patients the concept the have any real right to it.

The W3C released the first RFC for xml in 1996. This defined the xml standard (as based on SGML) and included (via dtd and other definitions. The concept of an external formation xml document.

Given the whole point of xml is this kind of thing patenting is really insulting to people who do real innovation.

@devnull

They are not patenting XML, they are patenting very specifically using XML to do a specific task as applied to word docs.

They came up with this tech, they sold it as their main product and were an MS partner for ages. MS looked at what they were doing, thought it was interesting, and stole the idea. Since MS did not steal the code, rather re-implemented it, copyright would not apply.

They are simply fortunate they applied for a patent on this process, (which is no more stupid than patenting a "business method,") and now have a club to beat MS with. MS is 100% in the wrong on this, and it's nice to see someone feeding them their own dogfood. (MS holds many software patents, a large number of which are overly broad. They have used many of these to beat competition about the ears and force them out of business.)

Now, if you want to argue that SOFTWARE PATENTS IN GENERAL are a terrible idea, I would agree with you 100%. So are "business method" patents, and the bloody lot of them should be thrown out. That said, as far as software patents go, this is not one of the bad ones. It's actually reasonably specific. For a software patent, it's positively narrow in focus. (Seriously, go read some of MS or Apple's software patents.)

i4i is quite simply not a patent troll. They are a legitimate business that once saw a need in the MS Office ecosystem, took advantage of that by innovating and creating a product, then got their entire business taken away from them on a whim by Microsoft. This is completely different than a company that buys up a patent that is overly broad/generic and goes after everyone they can as a source of revenue.

So let me reiterate: software patents in general (and business method patents) are a terrible, horrible, and fantastically stupid idea. Accepting that they do exist, however, i4i's patent is not an overly broad one, and the actions they took against Microsoft were not an offensive strike, but purely a defence...Microsoft struck first.

@John Smith 19

"Keep in mind it takes 2 to make a patent. 1 to write it, 1 to accept it's novel and *issue* the patent."

Er, no. Keep in mind that the second person hasn't been required in the US for over a decade.

For all these pleas to read the original patent, I've never seen a patent that was written in anything remotely resembling English and I've certainly seen no "explanation" offered here (or related threads) that makes me believe this isn't just a bleedin obvious implementation of what DTDs were originally designed to do. (Note also, that whilst XML dates from the 90s, SGML and DTDs date from much earlier.)

There is no benefit to society in allowing individuals to say "any application of this international standard in the following application area belongs to me". There is no evidence that i4i did anything innovative beyond that normally exhibited by a programmer skilled in the art and given a specification. This patent is neither novel nor non-obvious. It should not have been granted, but the USPO is broken. It should not have been upheld, but courts have no inherent expertise in this area and seem to generally err on the side of upholding anything that got the original rubber stamp.

Here's hoping that MS are sufficiently narked by this judgement that they start lobbying for reform.