Patent Office rejects Microsoft FAT patent
632880
The US Patent Office has made a preliminary ruling that a patent held by Microsoft for the FAT file system is invalid, after lobby group the Public Patent Foundation put forward evidence showing that the technology already existed in the public domain.
315010
(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. has failed in its attempt to have its Office Open XML document format fast-tracked straight to the status of an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization. The proposal must now be revised to take into account the negative comments made during the voting process. Microsoft expects that a second vote early next year will result in approval, it said Tuesday. A proposal must pass two voting hurdles in order to be approved as an ISO standard: it must win the support of two-thirds of voting national standards bodies that participated in work on the proposal, known as P-members, and also of three-quarters of all voting members. OOXML failed on both counts, according to figures provided by Microsoft, and by other sources with knowledge of the voting process. ISO has not yet officially announced the results. Microsoft could miss out on revenue from the lucrative government market if OOXML is also rejected next year. Some governments, worried that the need for access to electronic archives held in proprietary formats leaves them hostage to their software vendor, have mandated the use of document formats that comply with open international standards. Others are considering such a move, which could put Microsoft at a double disadvantage to open source products such as OpenOffice.org, which not only store files natively in the standardized Open Document Format, but are free.
585919
The company withdrew its application to gain federal approval for a weight loss drug after a meeting at which government advisers rejected the treatment on safety grounds.
98297
Microsoft Corp. is fighting a rejection by US patent authorities of a patent for its FAT (file allocation table) file system, the company said Thursday.
658770
IN A preliminary ruling, the US government has rejected Microsoft&#39;s 1996 patent on technology for saving files on computers using easy-to-remember names.
753162
A federal judge has rejected efforts by International Business Machines Corp. to dismiss a major portion of a lawsuit brought by SCO Group accusing the computer giant of copyright infringement.
498713
(InfoWorld) - Citing a mistaken filing, Microsoft has abandoned a patent application for technology in its Visual Studio software development platform that originated outside the company, a Microsoft representative said on Tuesday. The application involved Microsoft's implementation of the BlueJ developer environment, which the company calls "Object Test Bench," said the representative, who attributed the company's response to an InfoWorld press inquiry on the subject to Jason Matusow, Microsoft's senior directory of IP and interoperability. "Microsoft mistakenly filed for a patent on a technology included in components of Visual Studio 2005 that was based upon an academic project to help individuals grasp introductory concepts of software programming through pictorial representation of code," the representative said. The company had been notified by Michael KÃ¶lling, the creator of BlueJ, that the patent application covered technology substantially similar to his project. BlueJ is an IDE for teaching object-oriented programming and Java to beginners, according to KÃ¶lling's blog. "Microsoft agrees with Professor KÃ¶lling, and in keeping with the companyâs standards for quality patent filings, [it is] expressly abandoning the patent application with the USPTO (United States Patent & Trademark Office) through normal procedures," the company said. KÃ¶lling could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. But in his blog, he raised the question of whether Microsoft's patent application would be denied because it was based on "prior art," which is technology that already existed. "While I am sure we would have had a good case to file for prior art, and while it is likely that this would have stopped the application, I really have better things to do with my time," he wrote. In a blog entry last Friday, KÃ¶lling had expressed fears that the patent application could destroy BlueJ.
370088
Only five of 26 claims survive Most of the claims in Amazon's controversial patent for shopping with a single mouse click have been rejected by the US Patent Office. It follows a campaign by a New Zealander who filed evidence of prior art with funding from readers of his blog.â¦
192307
Microsoft faces heavy opposition in the quest to gain approval for its document format. In Monkey Bites.
608442
Microsoft Corp. has failed in a first step to win enough support to make the data format behind its flagship Office software a global standard, the International Standards Organization said Tuesday.
127794
Microsoft has lost the FAT, and it&#39;s not part of a slimming down regimen. In a stinging defeat, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has declared Microsoft&#39;s File Allocation Table (FAT) file
430128
Microsoft said on Friday that it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the OOXML (Office Open XML) file-format standards process.The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft&#39;s format and the possible standard.Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the OSP (Open Specification Promise). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then, Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company&#39;s Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to &quot;promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers.&quot;The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them as outlined in an article in Microsoft&#39;s Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML&#39;s rival file format, ODF (Open Document Format), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.
192325
Company says software maker has infringed seven patents, does not say which products use the technology.
77246
Microsoft is calling IBM out over its opposition to Office Open XML, saying it is attempting to create a movement to prevent ISO standardization of the format. In an open letter posted to its Web site, Microsoft claims IBM is trying to limit choice by pushing the OpenDocument Format.
522321
In a preliminary ruling, the government rejected Microsoft Corp.'s 1996 patent on technology for saving files on computers using easy-to-remember names.
570576
Two prominent open-source software groups have rejected a proposed technology standard backed by Microsoft Corp. that would close a loophole used to send unsolicited commercial ("spam") e-mail, citing unresolved patent and licensing issues with the standard known as Sender ID.
355152
FRANKFURT/SEATTLE  - Microsoft Corp.  has  lost a preliminary vote to have its Office Open XML document  format approved as an international standard, denting the  company's hopes of wider adoption of the standard by  public-sector organizations.