Info on patented Word files?

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

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On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 17:45:04 UTC
John Chambers <jc at trillian.mit.edu> wrote:

> This mentions that Microsoft is planning extensions to Word
> that  use  patented  technology,  and  intends to prosecute
> people who infringe such patents.  This apparently includes
> people  who  decode  parts  of the doc that's in a patented
> format. It would be very interesting to find some good info
> on  this  threat.   I googled for it a bit, but didn't find
> anything but some vague rumors.  Does anyone have a link to
> some hard info about this.
Just some comments. The various office products, such as OpenOffice,
StarOffice, KOffice (KDE) and others all have translators that can
read/write Microsoft Documents. The MS formats are undocumented, but are
reverse engineered by the various companies. One of the advantages in
paying for Star Office in contrast to OpenOffice is that it has
translators for more document types. 

The first lawsuit might become a landmark case. While there are many
cases of reverse engineering issues, there are no cases that I am aware
of that involved decoding a document stored in a proprietary format.
Maybe the issues on the GIF format might be one place to look, but I
think that the suits there were more towards producing a GIF file, not
reading it, and as I recall, the issue was in the compression algorithm.

- -- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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