Judge: Microsoft can't sell Word anymore

[kpac]

A Texas judge ruled Tuesday that Microsoft cannot sell one of its flagship products, Word, in the United States because of patent infringement.

You read that right: Microsoft cannot sell Word, the judge ruled.

Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ordered a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML," according to an announcement by the plaintiff, Toronto-based i4i Inc.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/176223.asp

[Quantos]

If I understand this right, you're saying that the ruling should be overturned by Wednesday?

[patio]

It'll be ruled on on Wednesday...not neccessarily overturned...

[Quantos]

I expect that it will get overturned, or at least really heavily appealled.

MS will not take this one lying down.

[evilfantasy]

i4i (Infrastructures For Information) is a Canadian software company with about 30 employees. It sells, among other things, software for manipulating XML in Microsoft Word.

Something fishy here. A Canadian company choosing Texas as a battlefield?

Oh, I see....

The Eastern Texas court is widely regarded as the home for "patent trolls" and litigating software companies (not all patent trolls) seem to like it a lot.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/aug/12/microsoft-xml-patent-case

[Quantos]

I'm curious now, this has got my interest for a few more minutes.

How can a Canadian company get a ruling that affects the US market.  I could see it affecting the Canadian market, or a US company having a suit that would affect the US.

Does the Canadian company have a US patent?

[patio]

It's already cost them a bunch of cabbage...i see it costing them alot more and/or stripping out the .xml reader altogether.

[Quantos]

This may be cynical side of me, but they'll find a work around soon enough.

[Computer Hope Admin]

This may be cynical side of me, but they'll find a work around soon enough.

Remove support for .XML, .DOCX and DOCM or write their own versions of each of the standards.

[Aegis]

If we give Texas back to Mexico, it solves a whole heap of problems...   

[mroilfield]

If we give Texas back to Mexico, it solves a whole heap of problems...   

What do mean give it back to Mexico? Mexico has pretty much taken it back already.

[ThomasTheXPUser]

Cant sell Word? Wow

[smeezekitty]

here is an amuseing quote from the comments

An injunction against reading an xml based file - what a joke.

Another frivolous lawsuit hoping for a sympathetic judge and millions in a settlement.

This is akin to ebays "Buy Now" patent. How can you patent a button click? Idiot people in the patent office - that's how!

[patio]

Seems they have been granted a stay...

More Here...

[BC_Programmer]

the lawsuit was ridiculous, it skirts the whole fact that XML is an open specification, and what tags are used are unlikely to be patentable.

And why is this lawsuit only coming up 9-10 years AFTER MS originally added XML saving/loading abilities?

In an interesting twist- the patent itself is so far reaching as to be ridiculous:

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=y8UkAAAAEBAJ

interestingly enough, this doesn't cover just the MS-word or Office document handling, but the MS XML Parser itself.

the MS XML parser was first released with IE4, in April 1997

Almost a FULL YEAR before this so called "patent" was created, and almost 10 years before i4i decided to sue.