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Microsoft ordered to stop selling Word by Judge
Richard - August 12th, 2009 1:12 PM
A court in Texas has ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word, after coming to the conclusion that the extremely popular program infringes a patent owned by a company in Canada.
In March 2007 i4i, a Toronto-based company sued Microsoft for violating its 1998 patent (No. 5,787,449) which is a patent for a document system which disposed of the need to manually embed formatting codes.
The jury found that Microsoft had infringed the patent owned by i4i and Microsoft has been ordered to pay $200 million USD in damages.
On Tuesday Judge Leonard Davis from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a permanent injunction which prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the ability to open .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) which contain custom XML.
Microsoft has also been ordered to pay an additional $40 million USD for willful infringement as well as $37 million USD in prejudgement interest. Tuesday’s ruling also gave Microsoft 60 days to comply with the injunction.
