RSSUS sale of Microsoft Word threatened by court injunction
By Tim Conneally | Published August 12, 2009, 9:46 AM
The US District Court in Eastern Texas, the hotbed of patent litigation where everyone from Apple to Nintendo has been found guilty, has granted an injunction on Microsoft Word on account of willful infringement upon patents held by Canadian software company i4i.
That's right. Judge Leonard Davis yesterday said that Microsoft can no longer sell Word 2003, Word 2007, or "Microsoft Word products not more than colorably different from Microsoft Word 2003 or Microsoft Word 2007," and must pay $200 million in damages to i4i.
In May, a jury found Microsoft guilty of infringing upon i4i's 1998 patent for "Method and system for manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other," and Judge Davis upheld the ruling.
The principal area of infringement is Word's support for XML files (.XML, .DOCX, and .DOCM), so this is not the end of this case by a long shot.
Microsoft has 60 days to appeal the ruling and stay the injunction, where it will have a chance to flex its new XML patent, which was awarded just over one week ago. Microsoft applied for the patent ("Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML,") nearly three years before i4i even issued a complaint about XML.
I say we abolish all software patents and that all lawyers should be drug in to the streets and shot....who's with me?
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|NEW INFO:
The judge had just gotten a laptop with Vista and Office 2007 and was upset that everything was
changed around and didn't like the Ribbon. So he figured this was payback.
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|How funny. i4i sells a product as a Word add-on : http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm
Do they want to hurt their own sales, or is their product so bad that they think they'll earn more from a court than from sales ?
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|Hypothetical question time:
What actually happens if Microsoft is banned from distributing Word in Texas (or the whole of the US or wherever the hell this covers)?
Are people with documents in that format essentially ****ed (other than pirating or Open Office which few people have actually heard of outside of our circle) if they buy a new computer, as the license is non-transferable from one PC to another?
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|i'd also throw in what happens if i4i starts to go after all the legit buyers of Office 2003 on up (we are talking schools, gov't, business, etc..) saying they must remove the offending application or face litigation on using software taht utilizes un approved copyrighted code. Talk about a lawyer free-for-all!
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|Alternate Headline: Lawyers Say "What Recession?"
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|This probably will be overturned. Microsoft invented the document formats in question.
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|Texas....tsk tsk!
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|This is more than likely going to be overturned. Beta News failed to point that out. Curious since it's been in every single article on the web.
http://www.informationwe...tml?articleID=219200383
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|The notion that the ruling will be overturned is an opinion, not a statement of fact. Tim showed that Microsoft has some XML patents of its own, which is a demonstration that it has a viable case for appeal -- the reader is smart enough to draw conclusions for himself.
-SF3
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|Well, there is most certainly prior art that can be demonstrated. This is a pretty basic concept.
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|I don't know whats worse, the fact it took 3 years for the patent to be awarded, or the texas courts dishing out rulings against the accused, like freakin candy!
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|Office 2000 used XML.
http://blogs.msdn.com/br...-formats-1998-2006.aspx
A Canadian company is suing a Redmond, WA based company in a Texas court.
Yeah, our legal system is "Just Fine"....
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|welcome to the modern USofA, where we have more lawers then any other country and infact more lawers then people in any other profession.
Tho I cant back MS on this, they regularly break/walk allover other peoples patants and/or just flat out steal products and sell them as their own(first big one was stacker, google it for more info)
ms will pay their way out of this, if they cant win in court directly, they will probbly just buy the company so they own that patent to.
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|LOL.
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|first they ban Vista? now they ban the sale of Word, gez... EU wanted to ban IE8, pretty soon Microsoft will just have its name
oh well, they were rewarded their patent hopefully they settle for less than 200mil or get the ruling overturned
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|The EU wanted a ballot screen.
MS choose to remove IE8! Not the EU!!
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