OpenOffice.org has offered a free, open XML file format for over 3 years, while Microsoft has just begun to introduce their own implementation of XML in their new office suite products. MS is attempting to patent their software’s internal methods of handling XML as well as their own XML schemas.OpenOffice.org’s Gary Edwards recently gave Consulting Times an interesting factoid: of the 101 current XML-related patents pending at the USPTO, Microsoft is sponsoring 56 of them for its own account.
This paradoxical embrace-cum-control of open stadards like XML rather places Microsoft’s ethics of customer care in a harsh and unflattering light. Right next to their values of Trust and Security.
Full background & color under “Software AG REALLY likes XML” at Consulting Times.
it’s the quantity of patents that makes microsoft
a more formidable opponent when you’re thinking about
litigating. the sad thing is that what they’re doing
is legal, perhaps not moral, but who cares about morals
when the bottom line is all that matters in a capitalistic
society?
Microsoft’s actions have nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism abhors monopolies like Microsoft, because they break the natural balance of a free market. That’s why all modern capitalist countries have antitrust laws. The simple problem is that our government is too chicken to do anything more than give Microsoft a slap on the wrist for violating our laws.
the problem is that patent laws are woefully ignorant when it comes to software. they are almost designed to foster monopolies, even though that isnt the intent. (look at the infamous “fat line” patent by ibm) open source lives and breaths via open protocols and standards, when microsoft said they are going to fight FOSS through patent laws, they hit the nail on the head. i shudder to think of the impact this one will have on the FOSS world.
It would be fine for Microsoft to dictate software developed on Windows, because Windows is a Microsoft product, however they should not be able to dictate what we can and can not do on Linux.
your post makes no sense, this has nothing to do with linux and everything to do with patent laws.
To the person who said that patents aren’t designed to foster monopolies: Classic patent theory is that they ARE designed to create a temporary monopoly to the inventor, in return for full disclosure of the invention. This provides an economic incentive to the inventor to create, and disclose the invention for the greater good of mankind.
The problem, as far as I can see with software patents, is that these are not properly scrutinised to see if they pass the “non-obviousness” test. Furthermore, the monopoly period, which was designed for industrial inventions is also a problem. IT moves so fast these days, once a patent expires, technology has moved so far, that it does not create a temporary monopoly; it is effectively a permanent monopoly.
Matt
XML is a complicated mess whose only saving grace is that it makes sharing information between applications much simpler than having various special purpose formats. Why then if MS is willing to go so far as patent their document format, thus killing off the whole point of using XML, would they even use XML in the first place?
Modern capitalists (capitalist fundamentalists if you will) want as little governmental control as possible. A “free market” in their view is a market where a company can make as much money and compete and vigorously as they want without the oversight of government.
Recent events involving the FCC is a case in point. The FCC was created to prevent the kind of uniform monopolistic media that helped Hittler rise to power before WWII and keep him there throughout that terrible time.
However, in recent years the power of the FCC and been intentialy cyphoned away, in the name of privatization and “free markets”. Now Clearchannel owns most of the radio stations in the US and will only continue to buy up more, until there is very little diverse opinion in US media. Beyond that, there are attempts underway to make it possible for single companies to own most or all of the media in any given market (they are pretty close already). If the FCC is really to become irrelevant, then you can bet your bottom dollar that a very small number of companies will control most or all of the media that makes it into US homes.
The software industry being so new, and having no governmental intervention has demonstrated this over the last 30 or so years as well. We have that one “winner” – Microsoft.
Capitalists claim that without government intervention there will be more competition, and that will lead to more innovation and lower prices. They always seem leave out the very simple and overriding fact that whenever there is competition, there will be winners and losers, and eventually, as happens inevitably in any competition, one winner.
Just to make it clear – I’m saying that capitalists do not want government control. The exact opposite is true.
Now about the patents – software is unique in the world. It is neither invention nor literature (though it is closer – both are an expression of an idea). So it seems in my view that copyrights and patents simply do not work for software, and some new method of protecting the rights of software authors is needed beyond the current intellectual properties protections. Software is a round peg being shoved into a triangle copyright system and a square patent system.
As I understand it, ideas are not supposed to be patentable anyway, so I’m not sure how software could ever really be patented.
“Why then if MS is willing to go so far as patent their document format, thus killing off the whole point of using XML, would they even use XML in the first place?”
Embrace, extend extinguish. We have seen it enough times already.
“Capitalism abhors monopolies like Microsoft,”
Monopoly is both the goal and rewared of capitalism. Capitalism = increase profits by increasing market share. If a company hits monopoly status, ie, maximum market share, they fulfill both the definition and goal of capitalism.
Actually I just looked up a few things.
patent
1. A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
invention
3. A mental fabrication, especially a falsehood.
So basically you can patent a lie 🙂 (Why then can you not patent a novel?)
@CaptainN
@Anonymous (cable.mindspring.com)
—–
Please read a “capitalist” paper or book published in the last fifty years. Modern capitalism is not like that at all! “Free-for-all” capitalism was long ago obsoleted by modern economic theory.
Capitalism recognizes that competition maximizes overall economic production. If each company seeks to maximize its profit, within the rules of the system, then that maximum will be reached.
Modern capitalism also recognizes that monopolies (as well as trusts and cartels) damages the free market. Monopolies harm overall economic production. Ergo, modern capitalist support government intervention, when necessary, to break up monopolies and trusts. Modern capitalism has rules. These aren’t just arbitrary rules either — they can be logically derived from the theory. Allowing companies to act freely within those rules helps the economy. Allowing companies to break those rules, hurts the economy in the long term.
Among other things, modern capitalism also recognizes that government intervention is necessary for public goods (clean air/water, national defense) that the free market does not produce at an efficient level.
Ha ha, American innovation will be patented out of existence. The future belongs to… umm… to… hmmm… oh well, maybe there won’t be any need for innovation in the future.
cheers,
Aussie
yes, Microsoft almost has a monopoly on two products: desktop OS and Office. Fortunatley, Microsoft’s position makes it VERY attractive to MANY competitors like Red Hat, Apple, and Sun. If Microsoft had an actual monopoly, they could raise their prices and customers would have no alternative. But Microsoft is already CUTTING their prices trying desperately to compete with Linux (see Munich and elsewhere). This is the paradox of a monopoly; it invites too many competitors! 🙂 I am not worried about Microsoft’s “monopoly”.
“Modern capitalism has rules. These aren’t just arbitrary rules either — they can be logically derived from the theory.”
If you enter the business world someday, as in owning your own business, and have to deal with arcane tax laws, a zillion different government entities and their Byzantine labyrinth of regulations, then come talking about logically derived theory.
This country is basically run by a two headed oligarchic beast consisting of a corporate head and bureaucratic head that occasionally snap at each other.
What do the tax laws of the United States have to do with modern capitalism? Capitalism is the ideal to which the US economy aspires — by no means does it do a good job of attaining it.
The theory itself is logically derived. The implementations of it are mangled by special-interested and people voting for candidates who sponser stupid legislation. Economists even have theories about why democratically-elected governments will f**k up the implementation of free markets.
Perhaps i’m misinformed but i thought one who is sued because of these patents can proof a patent is ungrounded. One of the methods to do so is to proof a similair method existed. Wether this method can be applied here, i do not know.
As i see it that leaves 3 options open for Microsoft.
1) Defensive patent; nobody is gonna get sued.
2) FUD; to create fear amongst competitors.
3) Both.
but those are of no value in the EC for the moment, so…
True. And as it looks like with the new patent law this wouldn’t apply over that either. But “FLOSS” which may run, distributed, developed anywhere — except in the USA hurts. It would make the software much more complex, leading to ie. several ports or a non-US port only. So there’s not only a disadvantage for non-US people.
Related article:
How will Office 2003 DRM impact interoperability?
http://www.newsforge.com/software/04/02/09/0512207.shtml
To understand why software patents hurt Free Software like GNU/Linux please see:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html#WMUPAT2003
FOSDEM 2004
this weekend
Stallman will have a speech there about software patents.
http://www.fosdem.org he’ll also have a speech in Amsterdam somewhere this weekend but i guess most people here don’t care about that. FOSDEM is larger audience and people anyway…
Is anyone from here going to FOSDEM?
Microsoft is already CUTTING their prices trying desperately to compete with Linux (see Munich and elsewhere). This is the paradox of a monopoly; it invites too many competitors! 🙂 I am not worried about Microsoft’s “monopoly”.
You should. There are different reasons for a monoploy to arise. One reason is network effects: the utility of a good for the individual depends upon how many other people already use the good — think telephon, for example.
An operating system (kernel) is a good with network effects. Aftes some technical requirements are met, users don’t bother about its special abilities but just how many others use it because it means driver support and lots of applications.
A GPL’ed kernel is already the only possible competitor to Microsoft. If it fails for whatever reasons, all others are doomed to follow shortly afterwards. They have already been displaced into niches.
Im afraid this is a really threatening thing to the IT industry.
I’m sure Microsoft will make their own closed version of XML so that OpenOffice won’t work with it correctly.
I actually hate M$ for doing this. That’s why i dont use their software anymore
now back to the topic
the german ct magazin wrote about this (xml as office fileformat) patent a while ago.
OOo uses many xml-documents zipped together.
the patent is about ONE single xml document, so the argument ‘OOo was first, so cannot patent’ will certainly not hold.
maybe we are lucky and this patent gets rejected nonetheless.
~ibotty
Would it be too much to hope for that the US patent office could reject this application?
How can any person who understands the issues see patent law as appropriate for as trivial an “invention” as a XML schema – nothing but a pattern – an SGML representation of a recursive descent grammar which has been common currency amongst programmers since the 1950s.
The implications of a patented file representation go far beyond the OSS world. Clearly MS could use their patent to prohibit the right of a person to access his/her own creative work, unless they have legal ownership of MS products.
Isn’t the Open Data a far clearer issue than Open Source? An issue which could actually fire up support amongst a wide section of the lobbying public (Lawyers, Doctors, Government, Businesses), who would be in risk of loosing the right to access their own ocuments? Open source seems an obscure and esoteric issue in comparison.
Rather than absurd cat fights over the nature of capitalism, is there not a battle to fight and win here?
Is it too much to hope for that the FSF or similar organisations will organise an effective mass objection in the US to these anti-social patent applications and, in fact, all software patenting that have not serious claim to be inventions?
Microsoft is also the BIGGEST target of patent lawsuits. IBM is using patents on things like drop-down menus (?!?!?) in its countersuit against SCO. That’s how IBM defends itself. Microsoft is doing the same thing, though that doesn’t stop the peanut gallery from playing the double standard card.
You play the game given current rules, and current rules make software patents legal. I’ve argued against software patents in past articles on ZDNet (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107_2-5076320.html). Software patents shouldn’t exist. That doesn’t mean that smart companies don’t build defensive arsenals, as that is the ONLY way to defend against patent claims (unless, of course, the claim comes from a company composed of little more than a team of lawyers and a stack of patents, but there isn’t any way to get around that).
“That doesn’t mean that smart companies don’t build defensive arsenals”
It doesn’t mean a corporation like IBM can use such a patent in a counter suit just to blur. If you attack your enemy in 10 ways while you know only ie. 2 are the ones you really go after then you blur the enemy and you make them pay their lawyers more. Plus the psychological effect…
My old boss liked to say ‘nothing is obvious,’ which he apparently learned from working on patents for his company. His statement leads me to believe that the patent office no longer believes itself capable of deciding whether or not something is obvious to a practitioner of the trade.
The whole point of the patent system was to encourage inventors to share their inventions with the world. This has the unstated assumption that the invention is sufficiently clever that: 1. it will likely not be rediscovered any time soon, and 2. the invention raises the state of the art. Without obviousness, this assumption fails.
I’m not worried.
MS is trying to patent their document formats so that they can be both “open” and “exclusive” at the same time. Only through patents can they more control interoperability, and even then, technically, only in the countries where the patents are even recognized.
But, it doesn’t matter. Really.
The more MS closes itself off, the more the rest of the community simply leaves it behind.
Right now, MS conformity and compliance is almost a driving force behind a lot of OSS. If they manage to make it so that compatible OSS simply can’t be developed, think of the advancements that can be made when they toss aside MS compatability?
Open systems are getting to the point that they’re compelling replacements for Microsoft, not simply complements to MS shops. The more MS closes itself off, the easier it will be to choose open systems and open formats.
Go MS go!
The reported facts are slightly off here. If you type “Hello World” into Word 2000 and save it as HTML, its actually a single XML file. The purported novelty in Microsoft’s patent application therefore probably has more to do with the use of ‘formatting hint’ tags created in their word processor by other (not authorised by Microsoft) applications.
As far as the quality of Microsoft’s patent drafting goes, I seem to recall this specification being so vague that it states the application’s claims themselves are the best example of the invention’s embodyment… a bit of a rush-job perhaps?