Microsoft Loses Lawsuit Appeal, Office 2007 to be Forbidden to Sell
By Craig Lloyd on Dec 23rd, 2009 at 12:37AM
Back in May, Microsoft lost a $200 million court case to a software firm known as i4i Ltd involving a supposed patent infringement. i4i says that Microsoft knowingly infringed one of their patents on both Vista and Word by “manipulating a document’s content and architecture separately.” This has to do with Word’s handling of .xml, .docx, and .docm files and how it infringed upon i4i’s patented XML handling algorithms. Obviously Microsoft fought back by saying, “the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid.” Microsoft then asked for an appeal. The court demanded that Word be taken off of the market and be forbidden to sell, but that was put on hold until the results of the appeal were final.
Well, the results are in and Microsoft still lost. So now they are forbidden to sell Office and Word 2007 starting January 11th, but they are working quickly to release versions of Office and Word 2007 that don’t have the patent-infringing features. They also said that the Office 2010 beta is safe from all this as well. Unsurprisingly, they’re considering another appeal. Existing Office users should be fine as this ruling only affects future sales.
via [WSJ]
