International Gadget Blog
Posts tagged Patent
Microsoft loses; Word and Office to be barred from sale starting January 11
Dec 22nd
It’s getting closer and closer to check-writing time for Steve Ballmer, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has just upheld a decision that would see Microsoft Word and Office banned from sale starting January 11. If you’ll recall, Microsoft lost a patent infringement suit against XML specialists i4i back in May when it was found that Word’s handling of .xml, .docx, and .docm files infringed upon i4i’s patented XML handling algorithms, but the injunction against further Word sales was put on hold pending the results of this appeal. Now that Microsoft has lost once again, we’d expect either another appeal and request for the injunction to be stayed, this time to the Supreme Court, or for a settlement between these two that would end this whole mess right now.
P.S.- Just to be clear on this, i4i isn’t a patent troll — it’s a a 30 person database design company that shipped one of the first XML plugins for Office and was actually responsible for revamping the entire USPTO database around XML to make it compatible with Word back in 2000. What’s more, the patents involved here don’t cover XML itself, but rather the specific algorithms used to read and write custom XML — so OpenOffice users can breathe easy, as i4i has said the suite doesn’t infringe. Existing Office users should also be fine, as only future sales of Word are affected by the ruling, not any already-sold products.
Source: Engadget
Microsoft forbidden to sell Word, will probably still sell it anyway.
Aug 12th
Latley Mirosoft was sued by a company that had a patent on opening custom XML files (the basis for word 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008(witch is pretty much all of them)) The judge forbidden Micosoft from selling Word (all editions) that can open .doc, .docx, or .docm. So what is it going to be Microsoft, are you going to find a way out of this, or are you going to pay up.