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E-book fallout from XML-related ruling? Judge said to ban Microsoft for selling Word in the U.S.
August 12, 2009 | 9:25 am
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By David Rothman
No April Fool’s joke here. As reported by the Microsoft blog in the Seattle PI, a judge has banned Microsoft from selling Word in the U.S., and XML is involved:
Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ordered a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML," according to an announcement by the plaintiff, Toronto-based i4i Inc.
So what might this mean for the e-book world, which increasingly has moved to XML-based technology? If nothing else, could this be one more powerful argument against proprietary formats? Just what might be extrapolated from the ruling? I’m not a lawyer and welcome input from attorneys and nonattorneys alike.
Luckily, the ruling may still be overturned. This is one situation where the open source community may actually want to root for Microsoft.
Related PDFs: Complaint and injunction.
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Comments:
Since there are other tools to take word processed content… even Word content… into various e-book formats (in fact, anyone who works from actual Word XML may be officially certifiable), this isn’t likely to impact the e-book industry directly. There may be other tools that could suffer the same fate as MS Word.
But that’s assuming MS, with its resources and the support of virtually the entire U.S. business world, including the Federal government, loses this court fight to a little-known Toronto-based company. Does anyone really think that’s going to happen?
Does that mean I’m rooting for MS? No: If they violated a patent, they should be held accountable, even if that means forcing them to rebuild Word from scratch (remember, none of us has to buy it). That might allow other players to gain market share with non-violating software, and I’m always in favor of competition.
According to Mary Foley’s Microsoft blog over at ZDnet, what is at issue is not the word xml file format, but rather the ability that word has to allow users to customize the xml schema on their own. This is an issue for corporations, not individuals. It might be an issue for publishing houses that wish to modify the standard word xml schema in-house. It also applies only to word files, not to powerpoint or xcel files.
The suit was brought in East Texas, said to be happy hunting grounds for patent trolls; and if it’s true that the east Texas federal court is more favorably inclined toward plaintiffs, Microsoft would find its chances improved on the appellate level. It does seem curious that a Canadian company would file suit against a Washington-state corporation in Texas, doesn’t it?
Anyway, I don’t think this is anything for any of us to worry about, except to lament the lamentable state of patents and ‘intellectual property’ in general in the USA today.
“So what might this mean for the e-book world, which increasingly has moved to XML-based technology? If nothing else, could this be one more powerful argument against proprietary formats?”
This ruling will be overturned and the patent will be declared invalid.
The suit isn’t about XML itself as XML is an open W3C spec and not a proprietary format (which ePub relies on).
1- The suit is limited to a single business-centric feature of Word: Custom XML not the open spec.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3712
2- The suit is being appealed and MS has its own patent on xml word processing documents.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=22595&tag=nl.e539
Venue shopping can be very productive for shysters and their customers but in this case it comes down to how badly MS wants to stomp these particular cockroaches. They may end up settling for a couple minutes of Office revenue to make them go away or they might choose to make an example of them. I would prefer the latter but I suspect it’ll be cheaper to bribe’em.