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US Court Tells Microsoft To Stop Selling Word
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.'"
exactly what did MS do? i mean i am pissed that they spurned the open document (xml) format and created their own separate open xml format... but exactly how did they violate the law by reading and writing xml documents? does this mean that all applications that read and write XML documents are violating a patent? WTF?
Okay, maybe that far back they weren't. But I seem to remember them being XML when I started using it, back before Sun bought them.
http://www.mhall119.com
Is this that "East Texas Patent-Troll-Friendly District" that came up a few weeks ago?
God dammit, Texas.