A Simple Explanation of i4i Patent Claimed in Microsoft Word
I have seen many comments and discussion on i4i patent. The big question in the mind of people is – “Does it make every use of XML for data representation illegal?” I think it does not. If it did it will be earth shattering and qualify for some kind of bail out. The lighter side aside, the patent is about storing metacode (tags) separate from the document. Metacode and metacode-map are terms used in the patent. As an example, you have an invoice represented in XML as follows:
Original Document:
<Invoice>
<company>ACME ABC Inc</company>
<amount>$50.0</amount>
</Invoice>
This is a simple XML format likes of which are used in several programs across the globe. Does “storing the original document as it is” violate patent? My reading is, it does not.
Now, let us say, you break up this in two documents as follows:
Document 1 is for the actual content as a large line (or may have linefeed).
ACME ABC Inc $50.0
Document 2 defines a metacodes map as follows:
| Metacode (tag) | Position in the Document |
| <Invoice> | 0 |
| <company> | 0 |
| </company> | 11 |
| <amount> | 11 |
| </amount> | 16 |
| </Invoice> | 16 |
It is easy to process document 1 and document 2 together, insert tags at the specified position and construct back the original document. If you are storing the Original Document as Document 1 and Document 2, then you will stepping on the patent’s claim.
The breaking up of the Original Document in Document 1 & 2 may be a kind of optimization. Is it silly to award a patent on this? May be. We all do some kind of optimization during the course of development. The reality is that there are many optimizations which may be called more innovative than i4i’s patent. If we had patented all of them, there will be a patent war.
