Judge: Microsoft Can't Sell Word in the U.S.

[amnotanoobie]

[citation][nom]HolyCrusader[/nom]O.k. I'm not a legal expert by any stretch of the imagination, and these questions come to mind: What does this do for people that need to buy Word - I have a customer that was about to buy Word (her newspaper requires the newest version)... will she still be able to buy it now?Also, what does this mean to those 3rd-party applications that offers Word compatibility, like Open Office, or some Palm applications?[/citation]

I believe the problem lies with the .DOCX and .DOCM format that they've made the default save type on Office 2007. Office 2003 and lower versions do not have this feature by default and people still need to download the compatibility pack.

Could they sell Office 2003 again? (Just wondering )

I could see Open Office gaining ground here, or being sued also.

 

[anamaniac]

[citation][nom]nukemaster[/nom]LOL. The Nvidia technique(Ageia,3dfx), funny![/citation]

Maybe they should. =D
How much is the company worth? $10 million? Would they buy the patent license in the process?

 

[back_by_demand]

Microsoft will win the appeal. No doubt about it. The reason there is such a thing as an appeals system in any legal framework is to prevent Judges with "bad judgement" or a lack of understanding of issues or repercussions from making big fubars. When this gets to the appeals court there will be more experience technical people who will see the patent owners as "campers" with no real interest in developing a product. They will probably still be awarded a cash settlement, but the ban of sales will be lifted and Microsoft will continue to use the software under some sort of licence.

When stories like this hit the press they sound so interesting, but if history tells us anything it is that when the dust settles the results become dull and the status quo is maintained.

 

[back_by_demand]

This is from the XML entry in Wikipedia
"XML is a fee-free open standard"

And the story above
"Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML"

So Microsoft has proprietry standards to begin with, then the world started to use open-source formats, Microsoft allows their software to use these open-source formats and suddenly there is a patent infringement.

Why does someone hold a patent on something that is open-source? Why is someone allowed to take something that is open-source, make a modification and then able to patent it to be a fee-payable product again?

 

[r3t4rd]

Um, why is everyone so worked up? Can't we all just purchase MS office/word from like China (Legit copy should be cheap there) and ship it to US? Works for me.

 

[back_by_demand]

[citation][nom]r3t4rd[/nom]Um, why is everyone so worked up? Can't we all just purchase MS office/word from like China (Legit copy should be cheap there) and ship it to US? Works for me.[/citation]

I guess cos that would be part of the whole "importing" thing that is mentioned in the article, you see there is this thing called reading...

 

[Regulas]

Blaaaaa Haaa haaaaaa, LOL. OK I'm getting up off the floor now. ..... Blaaaaa haaaaa haaaa haaaaaaaa LOL.

 

[marraco]

The strange point is that it anly allows MS to sell word without support for open formats.

I guess Open formats will only be allowed in Europe.

Strangely convenient for Microsoft. It protects MS from monopolic controls.

 

[Guest]

I can't understand how this could possibly be a good ruling. Lets put it this way IIRC you could use XML codes in a number of other programs before this guy filed his copyright in 1998. For Example you could manually add xml to a program called Arachnophilia well before, so in this case the patent never should have been issued in the first place and should be nulled.

Not to mention it sure sounds like a common sense patent that was issued anyway. It would be like Corel or StarOffice suing everyone that ever made a text processing software because they had a patent on it first. Terrible patent terrible ruling

 

[nachowarrior]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!


HA!

HAHAHAH!

HA HA HA HA!

 

[Guest]

Wait wait... I'm confused by x4o author. At first I was thinking that it's not that far off for Microsoft to intentionally infringe on a patent, but I just recently checked out i4i's website and saw x4o author.

So, now I'm confused.