ePatents

Microsoft just lost an appeal of a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Canada based i4i. Here's what the chairman of i4i said: "This is both a vindication for i4i and a war cry for talented inventors whose patents are infringed, ... The same guts and integrity that are needed to invent and go against the herd are at the heart of success in patent litigation against a behemoth like Microsoft."

So I looked up the patent. It addresses a standard problem in markup languages, namely, how do you separate the content from the markup. In HTML, a bold word might be represented as "One <bold>word</bold> in this sentence is bold."

But what if the content itself has tags in it. For example, to write the above paragraph I had to represent the 'bold' tags in a way that did not just make a word bold. So I had to write something like "One &lt;bold&gt;word&lt;/bold&gt; in this sentence is bold". Now imagine what the representation of that sentence is.

The patent in question solves this problem in a natural way. It simply removes all the special tags (the formatting instructions) into a separate part of the file. So our sentence would look like this (assuming it was the only thing in the file):

One word in this sentence is bold.
---- start formatting ---
<bold> at character 4
</bold> at character 8

The advantage is any tags that appear in the content are just content. If you think this solution should be obvious to any serious programmer, you're paying attention. I solve much more difficult problems than this every day at my job. This obviousness of course invalidates the patent. For this brilliant breakthrough, i4i was awarded almost $300 million.