Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 12th Aug 2009 17:55 UTC, submitted by Laurence
In what some will undoubtedly call ironic, Microsoft has been declared guilty of wilfully infringing upon an XML patent held by the Canadian company i4i. The judge has ordered Microsoft to pay a fine of 290 million USD, and has barred Microsoft from selling Word in the United States if the company doesn't comply within 60 days (a detail omitted by many). Microsoft has already announced it will appeal the judge's decision.
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Member since:
2005-06-29
What about this patent is supposed to be non-obvious? It seems to consist only of some set-oriented structure of <attribute, dataReference> with the "raw" data stored separately. This is basically an index-type structure, where the attribute can be anything one wishes to associate with the data indirectly locatable by the dataReference.
One example of this, very close to to idea of "format" and "text" that I'm familiar with is the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) Standard File Format, which was first published in 197l:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1671672
Given that one other view of this would be index types -- from those in memory to those in DBMSs, I don't understand what isn't particularly obvious about this.