Microsoft has applied for patents that could prevent competing applications from processing documents created with the latest version of the software giant’s Office program.
Microsoft Seeks XML-related Patents
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Wait, since when 20th Century America was a laissez-faire economy?
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When I said “early 20th” century, I meant realy early, as in the 1900s and 1910s. You’re right, thow, late 19th century is probably closer to the correct time.
Actually, usury is regulated by the Bible, not banned. It was the Catholic Church that banned it, but then again, they banned a lot of things not banned in the Bible
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I know somebody was going to catch me on this
There is precisely one statement in St. Luke that can be interpreted as condemning usury. But you are right that the outright banning of usury was established by canon — I think sometime around 250AD.
Actually, by defination, capitalism detests government-sponsored and government-enforced monopolies;
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Modern capitalism, anyway, detests monopolies in general. All monopolies have the same problem: they are not subject to market pricing forces. This results in any transactions between a monopoly and the consumer resulting in a deadweight loss — a general loss of potential value to society as a whole.
Capitalism, again, by definition, gives you monopoly over your property.
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We are using the word “monopoly” in a very specific sense — a firm which has no competition and thus does not respond to market price pressure. “Monopoly over property” is a meaningless statement — the term is “property rights.”
See Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nation for example.
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Capitalistic theory about monopolies has evolved quite a bit since Wealth of Nations was written. Specifically, monopolies, trusts, and cartels were recognized to subvert the natural free market.
The founding fathers obviously thought it was but forsaw the effects of unlimited patents with no time-limit.
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The Founding Fathers believed that ideas should be in the public domain. They were Enlightenment-era thinkers, and the ideals of the Enlightenment favored the free flow of ideas and thought. However, they recognized the need to spur creativity, and established patents as a compromise. Early precedent suggests that the whole point of copyright was to ensure that there would be lots of ideas to pass into the public domain. Dr. Lawrence Lessig has some excellent writeups about this subject.
It sounds like using Microsoft products helps you do your job better. I suppose that’s a good reason to be mad at them as any other reason.
<i?Just because something, “makes perfect business sense,” doesn’t mean it is the ethical thing to do, and sure as hell doesn’t make it acceptable.
Unless the patent MS is going for prevents OpenOffice and other word processors from opening up their own data files, then I really don’t see the problem. If MS wants to try and prevent competitors from reading/writing to file formats that MS created, where does the unethical part come in? I guess the entie OSS community simply expects MS to open up the file format and let everybody have at it for free, but what is in it for MS assuming they do that?[/i]
The only strategy that makes any sense for MS right now is trying to retain their dominance in the desktop market. They are already losing much of the server market, and while manufacturers are still paying licences, the overall long term licencing from industry, government, and other areas has shrunk dramatically.
By enforcing competitors to either pay to open their file format, or not open it, they have a method by which desktop users are forced to stay in the market they already exist in. While I stricly use PDF format for distribution, which is open and compatible for the majority of OS’s, I still receive many attachments in DOC format.
I doubt that the average desktop user is aware of, or even cares about the issue. If my customers continue to send me a MS proprietary format, am I supposed to just blow them off, or force them to use an application, OS, or even a ‘file save as’ feature they unfamiliar with?
MS just gave SCO $10M to enable SCO to continue applying the screws to OSS and Linux. This is just shot number 2, which will probably fail, as MS did not create XML, they only adopted it, as have many other companies.
“All of this Linux vs. Microsoft is alway reduced to politics and nationalism. Resentment of the USA and thier culture is what alot of this based on.”
Well then it’s a misguided hate. Considering how Linus is now a US Citizen (wasn’t he trying to run for Governor of Cali a while back?), Unix (and a lot of the culture that surrounds it) developed in the US, and Microsoft does quite a bit of development outside of the US (most of IE was written in India for example). Stupid really.
Most software patents are on IDEAS, not code implementations.
Wrong. You need to do some research on patents. Ideas are not, in themselves patentable — expressions of ideas are. Unlike most of you, I actually hold multiple patents. I know what I’m talking about.
As many people may have the same idea, one company claiming 100% ownership via a software patent is actually stealing — from all the people with the same idea.
That’s our Constitution. Deal with it. It grants inventors a monopoly on an expression of an idea for a limited time period. Congress gets to determine what “limited time” means.
Software patents on ideas are morally wrong.
Again, there’s no such thing. You’re confused.
You can protect a specific implementation of an idea, but not an idea.
You just contradicted yourself.
Microsoft is an evil company and the world is right in its fight to destroy them.
Oh, brother. It’s this kind of hyperbole that makes the average person roll his or her eyes. You need to grow a sense of perspective. Microsoft is a company. It isn’t taking people out and shooting them. It isn’t strapping bombs to its chest. It isn’t aborting babies. It isn’t raping women. Whether you like Microsoft or not, they’re using the legal machinery to their advantage. That doesn’t make them evil. Hell, when IBM uses the courts to fight SCO, I don’t see you calling them evil. It’s all a matter of perspective and reason.
“when IBM uses the courts to fight SCO”
IBM was taken to court by SCO and not vise versa. They have the right to defend themselves..
“Ideas are not, in themselves patentable — expressions of ideas are.”
I am not claiming to know about patents; but I doubt it very much that the ideas behind Excel, Databases, or
GUI’s where first expressed by MS. Some formats were surly developed by MS, but based on somebody elses expression of an Idea. Heck, ALL invensions and Ideas are baesd on a expression of an Idea somebody else had before. Da Vinci for example expressed his Idea of a bycicle on paper a few centuries before it was invented.
Recently MS made a fool of themeselves by threatning a 17 year old boy who used his name for his webpsite because it sounded too similar to “Microsoft”. His name is Mike Raw and he named his site “MikeRawSoft.com” …. God help us, MS feels threatend by a “own teen business” and wanted to pay him 10 bucks to change the name of his site.
MS isn’t an evil company (that word has lost all meaning the way its being overused now) but they are an unethical and immoral company. They are violating our antitrust laws, and the government is too weak to punish them for it.
It seems not a month goes by, but we hear of another hare brained idea from Bill Gates.
It’s really something, Steve Jobs stays up nights Inventing great Product. Gates gets insomnia by dreaming of better ways to screw with it’s own User Base.
I propose we invite Bill to get into another industry.
Hopefully, some industry that doesn’t effect the US Tech Sector’s Productivity and Creativity.
How about Lego Toys!
If you’re going to pull a stunt like this, simply withdraw Word’s support of XML.
If you publish an XML document with a schema it should be useable by everyone, with NO RESTRICTIONS. PERIOD.
mythought: Recently MS made a fool of themeselves by threatning a 17 year old boy who used his name for his webpsite because it sounded too similar to “Microsoft”. His name is Mike Raw and he named his site “MikeRawSoft.com” …. God help us, MS feels threatend by a “own teen business” and wanted to pay him 10 bucks to change the name of his site.
Aww, you didn’t read the latest news? Microsoft is backpedalling and offering many times that $10 to that teen.
Rayiner Hashem: MS isn’t an evil company (that word has lost all meaning the way its being overused now) but they are an unethical and immoral company. They are violating our antitrust laws, and the government is too weak to punish them for it.
If you read the antitrust laws, both Sherman Antitrust Act and Clayton Antitrust Act, you would find that the defination of a market is very ambigious. In other words, any judge can punish Apple, for example, because technically it has a monopoly in the PowerPC desktop market (Jackson’s ruling that Apple isn’t in the same market as Microsoft makes this all the more simpler). In other words, antitrust laws in America is extremely flawed, even if you agree with the concept.
As for immoral and unethical, I don’t consider Microsoft unethical for getting rid of weak competition. Netscape could very well hold their weigh against Microsoft – but in the beginning they refused to deal with Microsoft. Their product then was inferior to Microsoft’s (Netscape, for example, wasn’t modular and it was difficult for third-party developers to use Netscape). At the height of competition, they decided (rightly) than their products suck and started an extremely long 5-year rewrite that created Mozilla, whose development was frequently delayed by indecission and frequent changes in direction.
During this course of time, Netscape had plenty of opportunity to keep their market and thrive. They couldn’t. They failed. By comparison, Real had less opportunity to maintain their market, and even though most of us would agree their products suck, they are still the #1 in their market.
What I find unethical was that Netscape place the blame on Microsoft on their own mistakes. Certainly, with Microsoft in that field, their market size would shrink. But they could have stayed competitive and revelant. Poor business decisions prevented that from happening. AOL itself didn’t in the end use Netscape in their software, using IE instead. What’s more pathetic is Be’s and Sun’s case against Microsoft.
MikeDreamingofabetterDay: OS X: I know you already have all this misconceptions that sustains your little world, so I’m sorry I’m going to pop that, but most of Microsoft customers are NOT from this computer science “community”. And Microsoft isn’t legally required to keep its formats open; whether it is XML, SGML, or binary 1s and 0s.
IBM was taken to court by SCO and not vise versa. They have the right to defend themselves..
IBM files more patents than anyone on this planet. They’re constantly embroiled in litigation with competitors. I was merely pointing out the irony of the OSS community in placing their trust and hopes in a corporate behemoth that could care less about open standards. IBM is all about leveraging other peoples’ work to sell its hardware. And if you’re a competitor and you happen to inadvertently step on one of its patents, you’re toast.
Aww, you didn’t read the latest news? Microsoft is backpedalling and offering many times that $10 to that teen.
I’d call it a win-win situation: MS protects its trademark and the kid gets a ride to Redmond.
Excellent comments, otherwise.
Steve Jobs stays up nights Inventing great Product.
You’re joking, right? Jobs is a marketing droid. He’s not an inventor.
“And Microsoft isn’t legally required to keep ITS formats open;”
You say its formats. What format belongs Exclusively to MS?
Does XML, for instance, belong to MS?
“I don’t consider Microsoft unethical …”
I remember a show I saw years ago on TV. Steve Balmer said to a crowd of MS – devotes something like this: “Copy and Destroy the competition ….. ” To be honest, I was quite shocked to hear how Mr Balmer treats his competitors.
MS is well known to use immoral and illegal business practices – including SCO – to reach their goal of total dominion. You have to agree that MS products have become better since they have competition.
Looks like an M$ employee talking about the company he is working for!
Windows is a OS without development… Nothing new since NT4.
Since I started to work with bash I feel like good old days (with DOS) are back;) I feel no fun while using XP.
Just because you have done something one way, doesn’t mean everyone is doing it that way. You may have a piece of code or specific algorithm that you have patented. But most software patents these days are not on code or algorithms.
Essentially, you are fundamentally incorrect in your statements about patents. If you look at the patents on .NET, for instance, they are IDEAS. At the time of the patent filing, there was no working .NET and the patent is not on the code or algorithms, but on the idea of a UVM (which preceded .NET by at least 5 years) and many other aspects of the system (IDEAS), ideas that have been around for many years in many other products. The .NET patents are incredibly broad and in many ways vague. They are certainly not “innovative” or “unique”. It is Microsoft’s way of staking out a vast area of technical implementation and saying “we own this”. Yes, of course this is stealing from everyone who has ideas in the same space.
Also in America, you can patent “business models” (Priceline for instance) which is an IDEA.
Here is an excerpt from a recent Bruce Perens (BP) BBC interview:
CB: What do you see as the main challenges to Linux in the next year to 18 months, especially regarding the lawsuits brought by SCO which are still pending in the courts?
BP: The good news is that SCO has pretty much exhausted any chance of being successful in court. Their legal discovery documents have not yielded sufficient evidence. But, let’s go on to the future beyond SCO.
The biggest challenge that will face us after that is software patenting. Software patents that are being accepted are not necessarily inventions, their definitions are overbroad. And you can never finish a patent search. The definitions are so broad, you can’t ever be sure a company would or would not assert their patent on what you are doing.
You have to consider engineers today spend their entire careers combining other people’s intellectual property. And every small and medium sized enterprise is at risk regarding software patenting. That is a problem in Europe, because representatives to the European Parliament are pushing very hard for software patenting that would indeed shut out all small and medium businesses from the software development business, not just open source.
We’re looking at a future where only the very largest companies will be able to implement software, and it will technically be illegal for other people to do so. That’s a very, very bad situation developing. We must do something so that there is reason for people to innovate, there is reason for people to invent, but that companies can execute without this constant fear that we will be sued into the ground regarding software patenting.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3422853.stm
And of course, do read the latest from the source:
http://ffii.org/
You’ll find little tidbits like:
In an interview with the Washington Post, Intel Chaiman Andrew S. Grove says that the USA “needs to revamp not just the patent system, but the entire system of intellectual property law. … It needs to redefine it for an era that is the information age as compared to the industrial age.”
http://swpat.ffii.org/news/recent/index.en.html#intel031211
The patent system does not work for software (or most other IP). This is the basic fact of life.
How an Idea is patentable is beyond me. It just does not make sense. But than again – In the US everything is possible as long it makes money.
There, you can basicaly sue everybody for everything immaginable. What a free country.
Just because you have done something one way, doesn’t mean everyone is doing it that way. You may have a piece of code or specific algorithm that you have patented. But most software patents these days are not on code or algorithms.Duh. You can’t patent algorithms.
If you look at the patents on .NET, for instance, they are IDEAS. At the time of the patent filing, there was no working .NET and the patent is not on the code or algorithms, but on the idea of a UVM (which preceded .NET by at least 5 years) and many other aspects of the system (IDEAS), ideas that have been around for many years in many other products. The .NET patents are incredibly broad and in many ways vague. They are certainly not “innovative” or “unique”. It is Microsoft’s way of staking out a vast area of technical implementation and saying “we own this”. Yes, of course this is stealing from everyone who has ideas in the same space.
Dude, .NET has been around since 1997. It’s gone through several name changes but the underlying technology has been here since then. As for VMs, get real. Java is based on a bytecode architecture. Where do you think they got that from? Microsoft was running p-code in its Office and dev products years before Gosling experienced his Java bowel movement. People were running p-code years before MS, too. What goes around, comes around.
Bruce Perens is full of crap. He got fired from HP for his extremist open source propagandizing — and the leopard never changes its spots.
The patent system does not work for software (or most other IP). This is the basic fact of life.
Thanks for the tip, Forrest. Now go back to flipping burgers or whatever the hell it is you do with your copious free time.
How an Idea is patentable is beyond me.
It’s not. Jeez, rent or buy a clue.
Well said. It is however very American to let a company get to such a percentage of the market, before beginning to think there is something wrong here.
The whole idea stinks.
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I have also moved completely.
Well said. And in that lies the problem.
Please pay attention, ye who have little clue.
The Christian Bible is a collection of STORIES. These stories were carefully CHOSEN to have reinforce the growing power base of the early Catholic Church. The divinity of Jesus was voted upon at the Council of Nicea.
Relying upon one book to explain all aspects of daily life is an example of poor judgement that only rivals that of reelecting G. W. Bush!
“Take some mushrooms and squeegie your third f*ckin’ eye!”
–Bill Hicks