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.