No More Word
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.
