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Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

Microsoft Banned From Selling Word Starting January 2010

SEATTLE — A federal appeals court ordered Microsoft Corp. to stop selling its Word program in January and pay a Canadian software company $290 million for violating a patent, upholding the judgment of a lower court.

But people looking to buy Word or Microsoft's Office package in the U.S. won't have to go without the software. Microsoft said Tuesday it expects that new versions of the product, with the computer code in question removed, will be ready for sale when the injunction begins on Jan. 11.

Toronto-based i4i Inc. sued Microsoft in 2007, saying it owned the technology behind a tool in the popular word processing program. The technology in question gives Word users an improved way to edit XML, or code that tells the program how to interpret and display a document's contents.

A Texas jury found that Microsoft Word willfully infringed on the patent. Microsoft appealed that decision, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Tuesday upheld the lower court's damage award and the injunction against future sales of infringing copies of Word.

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munky2

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

$290 million? That's a lot of money. Not as if M$ can't afford it but still ....

So M$ really isn't banned from selling Word, only copies of Word that have the code in question, right?

dontknow

Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

Yes, M$ will have to remove all stolen code, or at least the stolen code that it got caught using in Word. M$ has a history of stealing code, so I imagine there is more just waiting for someone to discover...

munky2