When XML in Word Became Illegal

1) it has never been removed, afaik Word still uses OOXML, so Word would keep being infringing

2) LibreOffice would probably be infringing too, as ODF is also XML based

So... it has to be some other form of XML tool and not the file format.

As for Joel's comment, IIRC he was an Excel PM before OOXML; in any case his blog post refer to the binary format that precedes OOXML. I'm pretty sure OOXML is equally if not even more complicated, as the product themselves are way more complicated than they appear, but the fact is that he was talking about a different thing.

Edit: as many users pointed out, it's not the file format itself, but the ability to add arbitrary attributes/elements to the file format XML as additional data.

See https://www.zdnet.com/article/custom-xml-the-key-to-patent-s...

(edit: grammar)

The patent is about representing documents with markup (XML or otherwise) not by embedding them in the text, but rather having them stripped and maintained as a separate list of (tag, position) pairs, with the document only containing the raw text.

I'm only surprised that Microsoft couldn't find prior art, because having a (content-type, address) index at the beginning of a file is not exactly an unusual representation. It also reminds me that the USPTO's idiosyncratic usage of non-obviousness doesn't really match my intuition.

Does it imply that?

Another commenter has already pointed out why it's likely not the case.

But also, I don't think the article is well written. Partly because it doesn't clearly explain what the infringing tool was, or did, or how it operated. Also I'm pretty sure there's a typo in "ex part" instead of "ex parte". But another major issue is the following:

> $40 million of that judgment [against Microsoft] was imposed by the court as punishment for continually arguing that i4i was a patent troll even though it had an operating business in a manner that was “persistent, legally improper, and in direct violation of the Court's instructions.”

What?

Why would i4i operating in a manner that was persistent, improper and in violation of the court's instructions preclude it from also being a patent troll? It could do both?

Or is the "persistent..." descriptor meant to apply to Microsoft? That might make more sense, but the "even though" seems to be a comparison between two types of activity by one entity - namely i4i.

But then again, I might be reading "it had an operating business in a manner" wrong, because it feels ungrammatical to me. I might not be putting the emphasis in the right place, and that's what's causing me to misread the sentence?

The whole thing just feels confusing.

On the backend, all .docx files use XML. Joel is saying the root XML format was difficult to work with.

What my article is about is this: Microsoft used to allow users to write their own custom XML rules on top of Word. (This was mostly app developers using XML for macros rather than end users, and overall it was very rare.) This is the feature that was at issue with the patent.

Sorry if this was not clear!

Like, a good patent today would be: "Using a computer text prediction engine to automatically review and approve code."

It probably would have been pretty smart to skim through all the hacker news threads after ChatGpt came out patenting every other comment.

The thing is that patent office is funded by patent fees, so there is an incentive to accept the patent plus they are often hard to read.

Now, why this particular patent exists, and seems so general, is also likely related to prior art. What could be patented for software was a bit murky until the late 1990's when it was established that business methods implemented in software were allowed. This led to a large flood of patents in that space.

One of the issues is that the Patent Office tends to look at prior art as being "things that have already been patented" so when rules change, a lot of things that seem obvious are up for grabs because there's no prior patent. Now, these can (and are) challenged in court and, in court, they're more likely to accept blatant prior usage in the wild. i don;t know whether this case won it's challenge but it's possible that it didn't because XML was quite new in the late 90s too.

Source: I have a patent from around that time that's basically covers anything in finance that's data driven from an XML document. For about a decade, that covered a fairly large chunk of finance. I never did anything about it as I disagreed in principle with the premise of such an absurdly broad patent. I agreed to it being patented solely for defensive reasons ie it might prevent a competitor from egregiously attacking my employer with patents.

Default should be to not change anything, if a date is recognized offer a button right next to the cell that allows you to accept the suggestion to turn it into a fully fledged date. Just make it so that pressing tab or shift enter or a similar comination accepts that suggestion.