IT Curmudgeon

In a previous post I noted that Microsoft Word was identified in a court ruling as having violated a patent held by a company named "i4i". The patent was issued for the concept that XML coding tags and content could be processed separately.

U.S. Patent No. 5,787,449 is a "conceptual" patent, meaning the patent is issued by the patent office based on very general ideas. These general patents are like booby traps waiting to damage startup companies developing new software. They threaten to stifle software innovation, and are a rapidly growing threat to the industry.

The court ruled that Microsoft violated i4i patents by allowing users of Microsoft Word to create custom XML documents, which was deemed to be infringing on a patent issued to i4i in 1998.

i4i chairman Loudon Owen proclaimed the rightness of the ruling. Their product "x4o" enables users to create XML documents in Word, and their claim was that Microsoft used their patented technology to create the same capability in MS Word.

It is nearly impossible to feel sympathetic toward Microsoft, which has been slapped by courts many times in the past 30 years for a variety of questionable business practices. The software giant has indicated that it is ready to pursue multiple options in response to the ruling:

• it may pay i4i a license fee as long as it's software contains offending code
• it may release a version of Microsoft Word that does not have the ability to create custom XML documents
• it may fight the validity of the patent in appeals court on September 23, 2009
• it issued a request for a stay of the ruling on the grounds that it would lose a lot of money and that it's customers would suffer

None of these assertions really tackle the important issue, that patents like this should never be issued. Why wouldn't Microsoft assert that a patent issued on such general principles is invalid?

The reason may not be obvious. I suspect that Microsoft is willing to deal with a "minor" (to them) annoyance that will only cost them a monetary settlement. Redmond has been stockpiling a reserve of conceptual patents on its own. It may see itself able to extract far more from competitors than will be extracted from them.

Rather than do the right thing, and help the industry stop these harmful conceptual patents, Microsoft is likely to pay a short term license fee, swap out some code, and move on.

In a ruling issued on August 11, 2009, Texas judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ruled that current versions of Microsoft Word substantially infringe on U.S. Patent No. 5,787,449 issued in 1998 and held by a company named "i4i Limited Partnership".

The patent claims the rights to separating markup codes from content in documents.

This patent was issued after substantial work was done around the world by collaborative groups on XML, SGML and HTML using style sheets and other methods of separating codes from content. Many people believe that the patent was issued in spite of being based on prior art. This means that the information in the patent was publicly available before the patent was issued. The judge ruled that the patent was valid, however.

I have strongly advocated revamping our patent laws to prevent patents being issued based on loose software "concepts" like this. Rather than protecting innovation, as patent laws are intended to do, these conceptual patents prevent companies from innovating, and are granted to individuals who are not required to show specific techniques that could be improved upon with subsequent patents.

It is time to change our software patent laws before it turns into a lottery system for people who can afford to bury the system with general patent filings. Some would contend that this has already happened.

A while back I got a beefy AMD-64 computer with 6 gig of ram, an awesome video card and a Blu-Ray player built in. It came with Windows XP Pro. I paid the "downgrade" charge to avoid getting Vista. The people who sold it to me said to avoid 64 bit XP and especially 64 bit Vista.

So my 6 gig machine was sitting there with only 3 gig of memory available, since XP Pro only can see 3 gig. I really wanted to get the full use of the machine, so when Windows 7 trials started, I downloaded it and ran the install. The first release locked up without even getting to the splash screen. About a month later, another release got to the splash screen and then locked up. No worries, it's beta software. What should I do to get full use of the machine, though?

I downloaded 64 bit Ubuntu Linux, and it worked like a charm. I've had experience over the years with Linux, and I found Ubuntu to be a real joy. Linux takes a little bit of curiosity, tweaking and googling, but for me it was worth it to have a full-powered machine able to run lots of apps. Linux is not a "no-brainer." Some people just should not use it, and we all know who they are. Others though, really ought to give it a try. With web access to Google Docs, Firefox browsers, many email options, tons of open source applications, and Open Office, it certainly suits my needs.

So I was content with my beefy machine and its beefy operating system for a few months when I decided to rent a Blu-Ray movie and give it a spin. I rented the movie and tweaked and tried and googled like crazy, but couldn't get the movie to play.

I discovered to my horror that the people who control the digital rights to Blu-Ray decided not to allow any Linux users to play their movies. This is, presumably, to prevent people from finding out what the encryption schemes are and pirating the films.

Now comes the best part. The way to play a Blu-Ray movie on Linux is published on multiple websites, following the decryption techniques first released in January 2007. It involves copying the files onto a hard drive, downloading freely available encryption keys, and decrypting the files on a hard drive.

Now all of this seemed like way too much trouble for me, so I rebooted to the old XP partition on my machine and ran the movie player that came with the Blu-Ray drive. It was frustrating to have to go back to Windows to watch a movie, but it worked.

Isn't it ironic that the movie industry would enforce a policy that prevents honest people from legally renting or purchasing their movies and watching them on their computers with legal equipment?

Some old-timers may recall that the same battle was fought over the "secret" DVD format, which was not available on Linux until the coding scheme was so widely available that it was a joke to try to keep people from viewing DVD movies in Linux.

People are boycotting Blu-Ray because of it's steadfast refusal to allow players to run on Linux, in spite of the encryption keys and copying procedures being publicly available on the Internet, and hacks being freely available. It seems they would rather have people copying their movies than viewing them as intended.

People who I've talked to find it fascinating and foolish, yet perfectly in line with other decisions the recording and movie industries have made for the past 15 years.

In a previous post I wrote about how Google Docs were providing features such as office document collaboration that can make people very productive.

Even though I love them and use them regularly, I have to admit that the current features in the Google Docs programs have some weaknesses. The interface is clumsy in some respects and it is difficult to format and print wide multi-column documents, for example. These are the kinds of things that should improve over time. These issues certainly haven't stopped me and my colleagues from using it to brainstorm collaboratively from remote locations. It can be an incredibly uplifting experience.

Meanwhile, Microsoft announced that it will release Microsoft Office 2010 with features that will allow web-based collaboration. One person commented that this would "squash Google Docs like a bug." Let's look closely at what the competitive positions of these two giants might really mean in the marketplace.

Microsoft could have offered collaboration capability in MS Office anytime in the last 10 years, since the Internet has become ubiquitous. Collaboration might never have appeared if it weren't for competition in the marketplace from Google Docs. Office productivity software has not had any real competition for many years, resulting in slow (or arguably "no") innovation.

Google Docs can be created or edited free of charge to anyone who has a Google account, and the documents can be viewed by anyone who is invited to see them. This is good for Google, because it builds their brand and gets page views.

A model like that doesn't work for Microsoft, who wants to:

• sell copies of Microsoft Office
• cater to corporate customers
• maintain barriers to entry that keep customers from switching document formats

It appears that Microsoft will offer a server capability in the Office offering that will enable customers to store documents on their own servers and access them from the web. This is exactly the kind of thing that large corporations will like, because they want their documents stored locally to address security concerns, and they have the staff to maintain web servers. Presumably, the Office product would have a built-in copy of IIS for the low-end clients who want to share documents from their desktops.

Google Docs will continue to appeal to small customers who:

• like free stuff
• don't have to install any software
• can easily get their colleagues to collaborate, even outside firewalls

One of the dirty little secrets that Microsoft doesn't want known is that the number of Microsoft Office installations goes down with every new release. This is because the features have not proved valuable enough for customers to upgrade previous installations. Corporations are growing tired of the annual maintenance fees in troubled economic times and some are switching to Open Office. The market share of open source and free service offerings like Google Docs will grow as long as they provide value to customers.

Loyal Microsoft Office fans will be fans forever, but it is clear that Microsoft's office productivity market share is shrinking. It is likely that continued competition from these other sources will force Microsoft to innovate and compete, which will be good for consumers. In terms of the "cloud," Microsoft isn't there yet, and won't be there successfully if they continue to cling to the software licensing revenue model.

A while back I posted a blog article entitled Are Patent Rights Stifling Software Innovation?

In that article I posed the idea that the ability to patent a software concept, such as "sending electronic messages from a hand-held device" or "emphasizing a number on a web page by putting a box around it" is stifling innovation. The thinking is that people and groups are getting patents issued on general concepts without implementing them and by giving only sparse implementation details. Later, when someone actually manages to create a product that is profitable, patent trolls appear and ask for significant financial settlements.

A University of California at Irvine and University of Kansas study was published on July 16 showing the results of a simulation designed to test the effects of patent laws in general.

The study simulates "a traditional patent system; a “commons” system, in which no patent protection is available; or a system with both patents and open-source protection." The team, led by Bill Tomlinson of UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences and Andrew Torrance of the University of Kansas School of Law, concluded that patent systems may discourage innovation.

They developed an online game simulating the U.S. patent system, and conducted the study using first year law students. The results were published in The Columbia Science & Technology Law Review under the title Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts and concludes that there is no statistical difference between intellectual property approaches.

This study did not directly address the issues related to software innovation and the way that software patents are handled in the patent office. Groups such as the Free Software Foundation are working to eliminate all patent protections for software under the assertion that it is costly, wasteful, and stifle innovation.