[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Hi Rex,
It's probably not that serious. I'd say it's unlikely that this patent will
be granted and I'd be willing to bet that there are at least a 1/2 dozen
members of this list who could lay claim to some prior art. (See the bottom
paragraph for my layman's description of potential prior art).
Doug
-----Original Message-----
From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@starbourne.com]
Sent: Sunday, 25 January 2004 11:03 AM
To: Doug Hudgeon; 'Rex Brooks'
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Microsoft files for XML patents, says C|Net
I just responded to Bob Wyman's reply. You both have more experience
and insight into this than I, and this appears to be a more
potentially damaging development than I thought.
Ciao,
Rex
--------In response to--------
At 8:05 AM +1100 1/25/04, Doug Hudgeon wrote:
>The MS patent application can be read narrowly or broadly. I think even
>the narrow interpretation would preclude the community converter for
>word processing documents.
>
>Here's how the patent application looks from the perspective of a
>person who wants to build a community converter to read, parse and do
>something to a MS Word document.
>
>The broadest claim in the patent is, as always, the first:
>
>"A computer-readable medium having computer-executable components,
>comprising:
>
>a first component for reading a word-processor document stored as a
>single XML file; a second component that utilizes an XSD for
>interpreting the word-processor document, and a third component for
>performing an action on the word-processor document."
>
>This does not apply only to MS Word documents but to all
>word-processing documents. However, Microsoft cannot seriously believe
>that this claim will have no prior art unless the term "word processor
>document" is restricted in meaning (otherwise a web browser displaying HTML
could be prior art):
>
>So what is a Word-processor document? Interestingly, the term is not
>defined explicitly but, instead, is defined as an example in the
>definition of "markup language":
>
>"[0013] The terms "markup language" or "ML" refer to a language for
>special codes within a document that specify how parts of the document
>are to be interpreted by an application. In a word-processor file, the
>markup language specifies how the text is to be formatted or laid out,
>whereas in an HTML document, the ML tends to specify the text's
>structural function (e.g., heading, paragraph, etc.)"
>
>This specifically restricts WPML to formatting markup and apparently
>restricts the scope of the patent to the display of text rather than to
>the structural function of the text (although I'm not sure where they
>draw the line between "laid out" and an element's structural function).
>
>Here's what their sample document looks like:
>
>http://v3.espacenet.com/pdfdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=EP1376387&QPN=EP1376387&F=
>128&P
>GN=33
>
>It's all pretty clear to this point and if the patent is granted the
>community converter would be in breach. But the patent application
>seems to encompass more than the display of the word-processing documents:
>
>Despite the title, "word processing document stored in a single xml
>file", the patent contains the concept of a "hint" which seems to allow
>some types of information to be stored outside the "single XML file".
>The following paragraph describes a "hint".
>
>[0047] Other information may also be included within the document that
>is not needed by the word-processing program. According to one
>embodiment of the invention a "hints" element is included that allows
>external programs to easily be able to recognize what a particular
>element is, or how to recreate the element. For example, a specific
>number format may be in a list and used by the external program to
>recreate the document without knowing the specifics of the style.
>
>Now, despite the above example of a hint as a mechanism to specify the
>format of a number in a list, claim 24 describes a hint as:
>
>"The schema of Claim 23, further comprising a hints element, wherein
>the hints element may be used to indicate a meaning for an item."
>
>Note the use of the term "meaning".
>
>Read broadly, Microsoft's intent may be to restrict competitors from
>not only displaying word processor files identically to MS Word, but
>also to stop competitors from using the "hints" to extract meaningful
>data from the text elements. So it may be that not only would the
>community converter be in breach of the patent, but the community
>archival and retrieval system may also breach.
>
>Now, I am not a patent lawyer, but it seems to me the prior art would
>need to be a processor of a marked up document based on a schema
>(preferably XSD) containing formatting instructions surrounding a
>single tag element containing the text of the document. Optionally,
>this document could refer to additional files containing further
>information about the elements in the original document.
|
