There's an interesting event going on today and tomorrow at the Cato Institute, with a very practical focus: looking at ways to automate the process of getting legislative data into Wikipedia. That is, when new bills are introduced, and as they make their way through Congress and to the President, is there any reason that data doesn't automatically populate to Wikipedia?

Our project to produce enhanced XML markup of federal legislation is well under way, and we hope to use this data to make more information available to the public about how bills affect existing law, federal agencies, and spending, for example.

What better way to spread knowledge about federal public policy than by supporting the growth of Wikipedia content?

There are a bunch of services out there that present such legislative data, but having a straight XML feed from Congress to Wikipedia seems like an all around good idea.

Microsoft, who has become a strongly pro-software patent company (despite Bill Gates' old claim that patents would have harmed the software industry in the early days), is finding out (yet again) that such a stance can come back to bite you. We've already covered the somewhat ridiculous lawsuit that Microsoft faced from a small Canadian company, i4i, who claimed a patent (5,787,449) on an XML editing feature. Microsoft lost the lawsuit, and the court issued an injunction against Microsoft and claimed that the feature was worth an astounding $98 per copy where the feature was used. Microsoft appealed the case to CAFC who upheld the lower court ruling. Microsoft then appealed to have the entire CAFC rehear the case, and that got rejected. The only move left is to appeal to the Supreme Court that's exactly what Microsoft has now done.

To be honest, I can't see the Supreme Court actually taking this case. Unlike some of the other patent cases that the Supremes have taken recently, there doesn't seem to be any big constitutional questions here. It's just a silly patent that Microsoft is on the hook for infringing. Perhaps rather than fighting this individual battle, Microsoft will finally realize that it's stance on patents is only going to do it more harm in the long run.

One of the more troubling patent rulings in the past year involved a Canadian company, i4i, that held a patent (5,787,449) that appears to broadly (very broadly) cover editing a custom XML document, separate from the presentation layer of a document. Microsoft included such functionality in Word, and i4i sued. Amazingly, the court not only found the patent to be valid and that Microsoft infringed, but somehow decided that the functionality was worth $98 in each copy of Word where this product was used (estimated to be 1.8 million users). Of course, Word itself doesn't cost much more than that (in reality), and this is a tiny feature of Word that was very unlikely to be a key buying point for most users of the program. But the courts were having none of it, and even issued an injunction against selling Word, along with a huge fine. At the end of the last year, the appeals court (CAFC) upheld the ruling and the potential injunction.

Microsoft appealed to have the case reheard by the full panel of judges at CAFC, but that's now been rejected as well. Microsoft can (and may) still appeal to the Supreme Court, but I doubt there's enough of a core issue at play in this lawsuit to have the Supreme Court bother with it.

Of course, this is just one more reminder why Microsoft might want to reconsider its strongly pro-patent position. It seems like it can come back to bite you.

Another example of how the patent system is being used to hinder, rather than help, innovation. While we're no fans of Microsoft's view on patents these days, that doesn't mean we approve of ridiculous lawsuits against the company either. The one that got all the attention this year was a tiny Canadian startup, i4i, that claimed a patent (5,787,449) on editing an XML document, and then sued Microsoft and won (in Texas, of course). Not only did the company win, but the court ruled that Microsoft owed $98 per copy of Microsoft Word for this minor feature. On top of that, the court issued an injunction saying Microsoft could no longer sell Microsoft Word with this feature. Given the MercExchange ruling that said that injunctions don't always make sense in patent cases, it was hard to defend such an injunction as being necessary.

But... never let common sense get in the way of how the judicial system works when it comes to patents. The appeals court (CAFC) has now upheld the lower court ruling, requiring Microsoft to pay the $290 million and bars further sales of any copy of Microsoft Word with this feature as of January 11th. Microsoft's response is that it will simply remove this "little-used" feature. So this feature is rarely used, and yet it's worth $98 per copy of Word sold? How does that make sense?

Meanwhile, the tiny Canadian company is thrilled. It just made hundreds of millions of dollars for stating the obvious. And, rather than encouraging innovation, it's forcing a company to remove features. How is that innovative? How does that do anything at all to "promote the progress"? While some Canadian law professors might like to make up facts as to why these types of rulings make sense, I'm still at a loss as to how progress has been promoted here.

While we've been disappointed by some moves by the Obama administration (on copyright, federal shield law, civil liberties, warrantless wiretapping, etc.), one area where the administration has made really big strides is on opening up formerly locked up gov't information. The latest is that the Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register have just opened up the "Official Journals of Government" -- a document that used to cost a mere $17,000/year and is now available for free, online -- and made the Federal Register (basically the list of what the federal gov't is doing every day) XML enabled, so that anyone can do cool stuff with it. Ed Felten's team at Princeton has already created FedThread, which let you not only search the Register, but also annotate and create customized feeds. This is really great...

Just last week, plenty of tech publications were up in arms over the news that Microsoft had apparently secured a patent on XML word processing documents (patent 7,571,169). Of course, when you live by software patents, expect to die by software patents... as a judge (in East Texas of course) has now issued an injunction against Microsoft, barring the sale of Microsoft Word because it infringes on a patent that involves (you guessed it) XML word processing documents.

The judgment against Microsoft in this case actually isn't new. We wrote about it and the $200 million judgment back in May, noting how insane it was that the company holding the patent, i4i, felt that it deserved $98 for every copy of Microsoft Word ever sold. For what? Its patent, 5,787,449, is about XML editing of a word processed document. How that could be worth $98 per copy of Word is beyond me. Actually, how it's patentable at all is beyond me... but that's another story.

Of course, there's about 0% probability that this will actually stop the sales of Word, but it's ridiculous for Judge Leonard Davis to issue this injunction in the first place. As he well knows, the Supreme Court ruled in the MercExchange case that injunctions often don't make sense in patent infringement cases. In that case, the Supreme Court says that a judge should weigh a variety of factors in determining if an injunction is reasonable. From the actual injunction, there's no evidence at all that the judge weighed anything at all. However, he gave Microsoft 60 days to comply, which is ample time for Microsoft to appeal the injunction, and in such cases it's quite common for the appeals court to stay the injunction.

But, honestly, the whole thing shows (yet again) how screwed up the patent system has become. The fact that a judge would ban all sales of Microsoft Word because it can edit an XML document? And that's on top of a $200 million award for infringing on this patent? How can anyone think that's a sane outcome?

There's been a big push lately to get the gov't to be a lot more open with its data, and both the new federal government CTO and CIO have spoken up about the importance of opening up more data. While it may take some time, we are starting to see things happen -- and happen quickly in some cases. Apparently, the Senate agreed (despite some reservations) to make the data from Senate votes available in an open XML format, and just a few days later that data is available. This is absolutely a good thing, but the real test will be seeing what people do with this and other open government data sources. It's nice to report on the government doing something right every once in a while....