Microsoft Patent XML

scojones

Taken from http://www.irishdev.com/NewsArticle.aspx?id=629

MS patent Serialisation

Microsoft has been granted a patent for the conversion of objects into XML files.

The patent, which was granted by the US patent office on Tuesday, is for XML serialisation and deserialisation the conversion of a programming object into an XML file and vice versa.

XML, an open standard developed by the W3C, is commonly used for representing data structures in applications that exchange data. As applications will often need to convert between programming objects and XML files, this patent could cover virtually any application that uses XML to transfer data.

The patent is a clear misuse of corporate power and could be used to cripple many XML applications by enforcing royalty fee's on 3rd party software.

Clearly it is unacceptable to grant a single company a patent for the concept of "every possible way of converting between a programming object and an XML file (and vice versa)".

Should someone else want to save a programming object in the form of an XML file, Microsoft can now charge them for the privilege or simply refuse them permission to do it at all in the US.

Michael Tortolano, a senior software manager at Home Media Networks, agreed that the patent should not have been granted.

"Interoperability is the life blood of the computer industry yet we keep seeing software patents being granted which directly threaten the ability of computers to their basic job, to share and manipulate data," said Tortolano.

Microsoft had not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing.

Although such a patent is less likely to be granted in Europe, which has a less liberal patent system than the US, there are concerns that this could change if the European software patent directive is adopted by the European Parliament. Opponents of this directive, including IrishDev.com, which is due for a final vote in the summer, claim that it will lead to the widespread patenting of software in Europe.

Jonas Maebe, a spokesman for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, said that data conversion patents have already been granted by the European Patent Office (EPO), for example, SAP was granted such a patent last year. This patent, EP1267277, is described as a method for "modifying the data structure used by an application program to access database systems in a computer system".

"This [Microsoft patent] once more shows that the practice of the US and European Patent Offices is quite similar," said Maebe. "It is clear that by codifying this EPO practice in a directive as the [European] Commission and Council want to do, they will only make this sort of US-style patents enforceable in Europe as well."

The Microsoft patent that developers are concerned about is patent number 6,898,604 , which was filed in June 2001.

This is ridiculous.

DSLC

...Outrageous!

...Sometimes I wonder what must be going on in the minds of people who bring these things into effect - it's very disconcerting!

damnyanks

So if in America you create a program that uses serialisation you'd have to pay MS ?

scojones

Yeah, if you are in America, and you write a program that turns it's objects into xml files, or converts xml files to objects, you may have to pay M$, or M$ will simply not allow you to do this. It's totally up to them, they can either charge you or refuse to let you do it.

aidan_walsh

Reactionary title, there.

DSLC wrote:

Sometimes I wonder what must be going on in the minds of people who bring these things into effect

As was said on another forum, "the job of the patent office these days seems to be to grant patents, rather than to enforce them. Thats the job for the courts." Of course, its correct, and totally, totally wrong.

I think it goes further than being in America when writing it. You could also find yourself in violation if you sell to Americans, host from American servers, etc.

sjones wrote:

It's totally up to them, they can either charge you or refuse to let you do it.

If they care enough to hunt down every case of someone doing it, which I doubt. Persoanlly, I think this is a defenseive move on their behalf more than anything else, so as to stop some smart arse taking the patent out themselves and using it to make money of MS, Sun, et al. There is no doubt it'll never see the public domain, but I don't think they'll go too far in enforcing it against others either. Microsoft are doing a lot of work in interoperability between languages, platforms and technologies at the moment, and XML is their best bet at making that successful.