No More Word
August 12th, 2009
A Texas Judge just decided Microsoft cannot sell Word in the US because it saves data as XML. They are expected to pay $200 million dollars.
That just happened.
- Every successful software company will eventually be sued for infringing some patent.
- Thus, every successful product “violates a patent”, i.e. builds on ideas from some earlier work.
- Since every software product builds on ideas from previous generations (or as lawyers say, violates a patent), no software is patentable.
I believe we should eliminate all software patents. Judges, lawyers, and juries lack the technical expertise to understand why patents like this are so silly.
Update
In addition to being fined $200 million dollars for allegedly violating someone else’s word processing XML patent, Microsoft was recently granted patent 7571169 for…saving Word docs as XML.
The IT world is on the road of destruction – no new software can be developed, because it will surely violate some patents.
This is somehow as silly as the Amazon one click checkout patent. How about first blogger patents his blog?
Actually @Bashar, this is equivalent to the ten thousandth person with a blog getting a patent for somehow inventing the idea of blogging.