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Subject:Re: That Microsoft Injunction From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:02:52 -0700
i4i's patent (issued in 1998) looks a lot more specific than that to me.
The essence of the invention is that formatting / structure metadata
is stored separately and mapped against the text content based on
character position rather than, as per usual practice, embedded in the
content as tags. For example, the same text content could be displayed
as an 8.5" x 11" print document or an online help system by applying
two different metacode maps, rather than the usual approach of
generating two new documents with different sets of embedded codes.
The patent says, "In SGML this ability to overlay two or more
structures on a single set of text is called Concur. Its usefulness
has long been recognized but it has proven difficult to implement."
The last few pages of the patent go into excruciating detail about
i4i's method for doing that:
Without seeing the sealed documents in the case, it's impossible to
know what Microsoft might have done. Did they ever talk with i4i about
licensing the patent or about acquiring the company?
On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 7:08 AM, Chris
Despopoulos<despopoulos_chriss -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> Ok...
>
> I didn't wade through the entire patent that Microsoft claims protects it from this injunction. The idea is that these two patents are very similar, and the dispute is over who got there first. I did read the initial blurb and waded through a little of the deeper statements. It looks suspiciously to me like the patent says, "Here's a new idea... We'll use XML to represent documents in an application-specific way!" ...
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