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Microsoft Trial Misconduct Cost $40 Million
SpuriousLogic writes "The judge who banned Microsoft from selling its Word document program in the US due to a patent violation tacked an additional $40 million onto a jury's $200 million verdict because the software maker's lawyers engaged in trial misconduct, court records reveal. In a written ruling, Judge Leonard Davis, of US District Court for Eastern Texas, chastised Microsoft's attorneys for repeatedly misrepresenting the law in presentations to jurors.'Throughout the course of trial Microsoft's trial counsel persisted in arguing that it was somehow improper for a non-practicing patent owner to sue for money damages,' Davis wrote. The judge cited a particular incident in which a Microsoft lawyer compared plaintiff i4i, Inc. to banks that sought bailout money from the federal government under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. 'He further persisted in improperly trying to equate i4i's infringement case with the current national banking crisis implying that i4i was a banker seeking a "bailout,"' Davis said."
Its just that this company isnt a patent troll. Its a former close partner to Microsoft.
HTTP/1.1 400
If we had the transcript, maybe we could see:
The court transcript, even though it's a public domain document, is only provided to people by the court if they make an account and pay 8c per page. Once you have the page, since it's public domain, you can post it anywhere. RECAP is a Firefox or IceCat plugin that can automatically post those public domain transcripts to archive.org so that we can all read them and link to them, and that would help with documenting case law in the USA on swpat.org, among other things.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-biblical-vengeance-of-i4i/article1253054/
Six years ago, an unusual and powerful alliance approached a tiny Toronto software company with a fateful proposition. Microsoft was helping U.S. intelligence sift through relentless mountains of documents relating to the 9/11 terrorist attacks but had few means to sort them out. This firm, i4i, had the software that could intuit crucial, revelatory patterns that its own software could not.
It wasn't long before Microsoft recognized the value of the firm's technology, and, as it is now famously alleged, pinched it.
Guessing you missed fact that the company had a product which was rendered obsolete when Microsoft included the product capabilities into Word.
The relevant passage:
"Custom XML" refers to content within the file that is of a different XML format, with a separate "custom schema" to describe that content. The problem with such content is that there is no way for a standard to describe how such data should be interpreted, as it is by definition in a "custom format" and can be any kind of data. That is why "custom XML" is not allowed in ODF documents, and that is one of the reasons why OOXML is such a miserable standard.
And this
Interesting, no? There's one more headline, but only to debunk, Matt Asay's Microsoft's 'Custom XML' patent suit could put ODF at risk. Actually, it doesn't, so far as I know. Custom XML was one of the reasons ODF folks thought the OOXML "standard" was crudely designed, and that it had no place in a standard. It was a big discussion, and basically, to the extent I understood it, the issue was this: that it was a short cut on Microsoft's part, so it wouldn't have to do things in the usual standard way but could just keep things as they were, dumping a lot of processing stuff into the format, where, ODF folks said, it didn't belong. The very name should tell you why.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I don't know a lot about the intricacies of the legal system, but why is the client penalized for the behavior or mistakes of the attorney? Does the client dictate or approve every word that comes out of the attorneys mouth in court? If the attorney used misleading wording then shouldn't the attorney be censured or fined and not have that penalty included in the actual judgment?
It happens because it is the client who hired the lawyer. If you do something wrong while acting for your company, the company will quite likely be held responsible for what you do. Same with the lawyer. There is always the possibility to sue your lawyers in a situation like this, if you think that they were reckless or guilty for you losing the money. Let's say if your lawyer appears in court drunk and you lose the case because of that, you might very well have grounds to sue.
I RTFA (sorry, I know I shouldn't) before making the comment about contempt of court. The summary is roughly a duplicate of the first half of TFA, but the telling phrase is in the second half:
"All these arguments were persistent, legally improper, and in direct violation of the Court's instructions," Davis said.
Directly violating a court's instructions is generally contempt.
While I don't like software patents, I think i4i are not really patent trolls. From what I've read, they actually have a product that plugs into MS Word that does what their patent says it does. So it's not like they applied for a patent and sat around waiting for everyone to adopt XML. i4i have a product, they patented the "technology," and Microsoft simply implemented the same functionality which threaten their product. Like all great American companies, i4i sued.
The problem isn't that Microsoft bundled technology into Word. The problem is that i4i had a patent on said technology, and that Microsoft knew about the patent before deciding to "make it obsolete."
I suggest reading the entire patent before trying to summarize. It's significantly more complex than what you described.
We're talking about patents, not copyrights. There's a big difference.
-William Brendel
They may not be patent trolls, but they sure are acting like patent trolls. They applied for a patent on something that has been done for decades, then chose to sue in a district in Texas that is known for automatically allowing all patents and ignoring validity challenges (and thus is the venue of choice for patent trolls). About the only thing not patent troll about them is that they actually had a product at one time. Even still, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Like all great American companies, i4i sued.
i4i is Canadian.
If you were trying to sue someone for violating your patent, where would you rather do it: A jurisdiction very friendly to patents, or one that is hostile to patents?