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Wednesday, February 9, 2005

Company News — NAC Geographic Products Inc.

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Does Microsoft Infringe the Natural Area Coding System?

9 Feb 2008 Toronto, Canada - NAC Geographic Products Inc. (http://www.nacgeo.com) has noticed that Microsoft has filed a patent Compact text encoding of latitude/longitude coordinates (Application No. 20050023524) that seems an infringement of the Natural Area Coding System that was developed ten years ago by NAC Geographic Products Inc. Microsofts patent application that is so similar to the Natural Area Coding System that will produce exactly the same character strings as the Universal Addresses produced by the Natural Area Coding System. They both realized that decimal longitude/latitude coordinates are too long and have to be compacted. They both use a 30-based number to compact the longitude/latitude coordinates. They both employ the equivalent algorithm to convert the coordinates of longitude and latitude into integers and then use a character set with exactly the same number of characters and the same character orders (NAC: 0123456789BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXZ and Microsoft: 0123456789bcdfghjkmnpqrstvwxyz) except that 1. NAC has letter "L" without Y and Microsoft has "Y" without L; 2. A slight difference in handling the round-off; 3. NAC puts longitude string before latitude string separated with a space and Microsoft puts latitude string in front of longitude string without a space; 4. NAC uses capital letters while Microsoft uses lower case letters. If a code does not use any letters after "L", they will produce the same character strings or slightly different strings caused by the different rounding-off methods. For example, for longitude: -127.8202 and latitude: 3.436086111, NAC is 4BFGJ HK5DC and Microsoft's code is hk5dc4bfgj. The differences are only the order (NAC puts longitude string first with a space, and Microsoft puts latitude string first without a space) and the case (NAC uses upper case letters, Microsoft uses lower case letters).
Dr. Xinhang Shen of NAC Geographic Products Inc. filed a patent application in United States on August 31, 1994 (Application No. 08/298,265) and an international patent application on August 31, 1995 (Application No. WO9607170). Since the Natural Area Coding System is a huge project that needs a long time to get accepted in the world, it was not practical to protect it using the patent laws. He retreated the patent applications and turned it into a proprietary standard protected by the International Copyright Laws. Thereafter, the detail description of the system was published on the Internet. On 2002 GeoTECH Event, Dr. Xinhang Shen made a presentation Geographic Coordinates and the Universal Addresses to introduce the Natural Area Coding System. On September 20, 2002, he sent a proposal to Mr. Bill Gates of Microsoft to license the Natural Area Coding System, but received a simple reply from Bill Gates Office that said "Microsoft has no interests in your NAC technology". The letter did not have any person's name and signature. Half year later, on July 31, 2003, Microsoft filed their patent application that is so similar to the Natural Area Coding System. Was Microsoft really not interested in the technology at that time? Are the extreme similarities just a coincident or an infringement?

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