A Canadian company sues in a Texas court about a product made by a Washington state company violating their US patent. The result? Microsoft can’t sell MS Word in 60 days, unless an injunction is stopped by a higher court.
They filed the suit in 2007 shopping it to the litigant friendly Eastern District of Texas.
The ruling will be overturned. And Microsoft should not settle with the plaintiff. Their patent claims and suit are ridiculous. The concepts involved were first formally done in SGML in the 80’s and the XML language Microsoft was accused of reading was finalized in 1998 – six years before they filed their patent claim.
Their concept “a meta document describing the order of another document”, while formalized in XML’s 1998 specification, was also done in various forms in proprietary formats (such as Framemaker’s and Aldus’ file formats) well prior to that. It is a little thing called “prior art”.
This is why software patents are stupid. This is also why LOSERS should pay in court.
Patents are supposed to reward innovation and enhance competition. Software patents do nothing of the sort. Just imagine if Ada Lovelace, or Grace Hopper had patented a “logical way to make decisions artificially, called an “if” statement”.