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Microsoft Files "Emergency Motion" To Ship Word
adeelarshad82 writes "Several days after a judge ordered Microsoft to halt sales of Word and handed down $290M in fines, the software giant has moved to stop the ban. On Friday Microsoft filed an emergency motion to stop the judgment and waive the bond requirement, according to court filings. The actual document was filed under seal, so the full contents of the request have not yet been made public."
Even if this is unquestionably a patent violation, the Supreme Court has already held, in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C. (2006), that an injunction prohibiting sale of the infringing product is not necessarily the appropriate remedy in all cases. Rather, the traditional four factors for issuing an injunction must be balanced: 1) that the injury is irreparable; 2) that there are inadequate alternate remedies to compensate for the injury; 3) that the balance of hardships favors the plaintiff; and 4) that an injunction does not harm the public interest. Microsoft has an least a plausible argument that they are not satisfied in this case, and that alternate remedies (perhaps money damages) would be better than an injunction against sale, even if indeed Word is infringing.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Nope. MS got what it deserved.
They did not question patent's validity in fear that it might undermine their portfolio. So let them suffer.
They argued both that the patent was invalid and that they didn't infringe on it, in any case. They lost on both points, but they certainly made the argument.
This isn't a "state-level" judge, its a federal judge.
The Constitution of the United States lays out the specific kinds of cases in which the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction, other than that, all federal judicial power rests initially in lower trial courts, with the Supreme Court only hearing appeals (and, for the most part, not even direct appeals.)
Except, there are no patent trolls in this case. i4i ships and sells an actual product, the patented code for which Microsoft actually stole after working with them.
In general, the idea behind injunctions is to minimize irrepairable harm. If this injunction stands and Microsoft then wins the case that would result in what amounts of major irrepairable harm to Microsoft given the large amount of software they would need to sell in the meantime with reduced functionality. However, allowing Microsoft to continue to sell the software will have less of an impact on the company suing since there are already so many copies of Word out there.
Except that the plaintiffs are not patent trolls and have a real and verifiable grievance.
The system is so broken that they'd be sued by every small-time squatter who had the gumption to slip an idea through the patent office. It's cheaper to just register everything you can think of and then out-lawyer your competition. Microsoft ain't the only ones doing it either.
While you're being funny, if it was filed in Federal Court, the choices are Word Perfect or PDF...last I checked.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
... PDF is an open format and it's harder to modify after receipt than a Word file.
You can edit PDF files in OpenOffice. It's not difficult.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
By that definition, i4i is a patent troll
Except for that whole "without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts" part.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Except this patent is nonsense.
The patent is a system that covers taking a plain text file, and saying "from character 3 to character 42 is bold, from character 67 to 90 is in sans-serif. characters 3 to 90 are the first paragraph" etc.
I can tell you this is exactly how the Quark file format works. Quark 6 and above even use XML to do the styles.
After reading the verdict its pretty clear that Microsoft knew about this patent and i4i long before they implemented custom XML. Its probable that they did infact learn about custom XML through i4is products and patents. Internal mails was shown where Microsoft did mention i4i and even their patent numbers.
It looks as if Microsofts counsels has done pretty much anything possible to defend themselves but the case is so darn clearcut that they just cant win. The problem for Microsoft is that Office Open XML has now become i4is bitch while ODF is wholly in the clear and unencumbered by i4i patents (according to i4i). Since ECMA-376 contains the i4i patented technology in the standard its worthless to anyone in the US.
HTTP/1.1 400
Or else who will i4i shake down next? OpenOffice? ...
Err... wake up.
As noted in several comments, i4i themselves have stated that Openoffice/ODF are *not* affected by this patent.