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The Daily OrangeMicrosoft found guilty of patent infringement, ordered to halt sales
By Reginald Addae
Posted: 9/2/09, 3:17 AM EST Section: News
Start your midterm essays now. Microsoft has 38 days to stop selling Microsoft Word-based products.
A U.S. District Court judge found Microsoft's Word software had an infringement on a patent owned by i4i, a Canadian-based software company. Still, field experts predict the ruling is not unlikely to stop sales, nor can anyone predict what the eventual outcome will be.
Microsoft was ordered to pay $290 million in penalties to i4i on Aug. 11 and to either redesign Word to remove the patented technology, or stop selling future Word products that contain this technology within 60 days.
The technology in question is i4i's patented XML, or accelerated mark-up language, a system for electronically-encoding data.
Geoff Feldman, a sole proprietor and software problem solver at Seabase Consulting in Boston, likened i4i to a patent troll trying to hold up a firm with deep pockets. He said Microsoft will either win its case or settle.
David Stevenson, senior software engineer at Data PAC Mailing Systems, on the other hand, said he believes that the lawsuit is invalid because XML is a subset of an already-existing markup language known as SGML, thus Microsoft should be able to market and sell Word.
Stephen Masiclat, director of the media management program at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, disagrees. He said Microsoft deserved the ruling.
"I4i worked hard to develop this new technology, so Microsoft had no right to steal it and get away with it," Masiclat said.
The location of the case in eastern Texas could have played a role in the ruling, said Stuart Rotblat, desktop system administrator at SU's Martin J. Whitman School of Management. Eastern Texas has been known to rule in favor of patent owners in the past.
"If Microsoft is to win its appeal, it needs to change the venue of the case," Rotblat said.
Feldman said the ruling shouldn't affect Microsoft's popularity, because its competitors would also be bound by i4i's claim since they use XML, too.
Among the competitors also using XML are Google Documents, OpenOffice.org and Apple's iWork, but none of these have been developed to the extent of Microsoft Word. Rotblat said that although these are key players in the market, the prospect of them competing with Word is improbable.
But Rotblat said these smaller companies will most likely dodge similar lawsuits. The company i4i claims they will only go after major corporations such as Microsoft who reap high profit margins from their patent.
Still the prospect of losing Word has some students concerned.
Jovita Dsa, a graduate student majoring in public relations, thought the loss of Word would be detrimental.
"If there was an appropriate alternative to Word, then maybe it wouldn't be so bad," he said. "But I don't think there is and most of the world works on Word, so I would imagine that it won't be easy to get people to switch or stop using Word."
rnaddae@syr.edu
A U.S. District Court judge found Microsoft's Word software had an infringement on a patent owned by i4i, a Canadian-based software company. Still, field experts predict the ruling is not unlikely to stop sales, nor can anyone predict what the eventual outcome will be.
Microsoft was ordered to pay $290 million in penalties to i4i on Aug. 11 and to either redesign Word to remove the patented technology, or stop selling future Word products that contain this technology within 60 days.
The technology in question is i4i's patented XML, or accelerated mark-up language, a system for electronically-encoding data.
Geoff Feldman, a sole proprietor and software problem solver at Seabase Consulting in Boston, likened i4i to a patent troll trying to hold up a firm with deep pockets. He said Microsoft will either win its case or settle.
David Stevenson, senior software engineer at Data PAC Mailing Systems, on the other hand, said he believes that the lawsuit is invalid because XML is a subset of an already-existing markup language known as SGML, thus Microsoft should be able to market and sell Word.
Stephen Masiclat, director of the media management program at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, disagrees. He said Microsoft deserved the ruling.
"I4i worked hard to develop this new technology, so Microsoft had no right to steal it and get away with it," Masiclat said.
The location of the case in eastern Texas could have played a role in the ruling, said Stuart Rotblat, desktop system administrator at SU's Martin J. Whitman School of Management. Eastern Texas has been known to rule in favor of patent owners in the past.
"If Microsoft is to win its appeal, it needs to change the venue of the case," Rotblat said.
Feldman said the ruling shouldn't affect Microsoft's popularity, because its competitors would also be bound by i4i's claim since they use XML, too.
Among the competitors also using XML are Google Documents, OpenOffice.org and Apple's iWork, but none of these have been developed to the extent of Microsoft Word. Rotblat said that although these are key players in the market, the prospect of them competing with Word is improbable.
But Rotblat said these smaller companies will most likely dodge similar lawsuits. The company i4i claims they will only go after major corporations such as Microsoft who reap high profit margins from their patent.
Still the prospect of losing Word has some students concerned.
Jovita Dsa, a graduate student majoring in public relations, thought the loss of Word would be detrimental.
"If there was an appropriate alternative to Word, then maybe it wouldn't be so bad," he said. "But I don't think there is and most of the world works on Word, so I would imagine that it won't be easy to get people to switch or stop using Word."
rnaddae@syr.edu
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
TB
posted 9/02/09 @ 8:26 AM EST
You write: "Still, field experts predict the ruling is not unlikely to stop sales, nor can anyone predict what the eventual outcome will be."
You write "is not unlikely to stop sales," which means it "is likely to stop sales. (Continued…)
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