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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
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 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.