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US Court Tells Microsoft To Stop Selling Word

Posted by Soulskill on from the somebody's-not-having-a-good-day dept.

oranghutan writes "A judge in a Texas court has given Microsoft 60 days to comply with an order to stop selling Word products in their existing state as the result of a patent infringement suit filed by i4i. According to the injunction, Microsoft is forbidden from selling Word products that let people create XML documents, which both the 2003 and 2007 versions let you do. Michael Cherry, an analyst quoted in the article, said, 'It's going to take a long time for this kind of thing to get sorted out.' Few believe the injunction will actually stop Word from being sold because there are ways of working around it. In early 2009, a jury in the Texas court ordered Microsoft to pay i4i $200 million for infringing on the patent. ZDNet has a look at the patent itself, saying it 'sounds a bit generic.'"

4 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. This is nuts. by JeffSpudrinski · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Even if you're not a Microsoft fan, you have to admit this is pretty frapped up.

    According to the ZDNet article, Microsoft owns a patent on XML in word processor documents, but i4i owns the patent for "anything that touches custom XML formatting" in said documents.

    The way i4i's patent sounds, this would also affect other things like OpenOffice.org and anything else that uses XML formatted documents. That's like, the entire current generation of word processors, isn't it?

    I'm starting to wonder if patent lawyers can pick and choose who grants their patents from the Patent Office (they pick the non-tech literate ones) like they do with the courts when they sue over patent infringement (e.g. most patent cases are from east Texas).

    -JJS

    1. Re:This is nuts. by Pieroxy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      To be honest, the way I understand it is that every piece of software that produces an XML stream is infringe this patent. Think every piece of webservice and XML processing out there. I'd say that pretty much every piece of software out there infringes on this.

      --
      Write boring code, not shiny code!
  2. So is OOXML then no longer an 'open standard'? by Palestrina · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Remember, Microsoft pushed 'Custom XML' as a key distinguishing feature of OOXML during the fight to get it approved in ISO. 'Custom XML' was the reason (according to them) why ODF was not sufficient, feature-wise. IANAL, but if Microsoft cannot implement "Custom XML" without licensing this patent from i4i for a quarter of a billion dollars, then doesn't this likely mean that no one else is free to use "custom XML" either? Ergo, OOXML is not an open standard.

  3. But MS Holds the Patent on Using XML for Docs! by Cryophallion · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The circle of life:

    According to This Patent, they invented having the XML hold the word processing info... It's just too bad that they didn't invent a way to write the xml file itself.

    So, in the current US situation, no one can create an xml word processing document, as you can't write the xml, but even if you could, you aren't allowed to store the font and page number in the file.

    This is beyond ridiculous