A Texas judge on Tuesday issued a final judgment against Microsoft in a patent suit related to its word-processing software. Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ruled in favor of i4i, a Canadian technology firm that claimed Microsoft violated its intellectual-property rights for custom XML in Word 2003 and Word 2007.
Davis ordered Microsoft to pay in excess of $290 million and issued a permanent injunction against the software giant for the “449 patent.” The judge ruled that Microsoft willfully infringed on the patent and permanently enjoined Microsoft from selling Word 2003 and Word 2007 in the United States and using any infringing future Word products to open an XML file containing custom XML.
“We are very pleased with the terms of the final judgment. The financial award due to i4i is now over $290 million and a permanent injunction has also been issued against Microsoft,” said Michel Vulpe, founder of i4i and an inventor of the 449 patent. “We feel vindicated with this result. i4i will do its utmost to support custom XML users, which is particularly important to implement the ISO 29500 OOXML standard.”
The Case Against Word
The technology in this case focuses on a particular type of electronic document. Generally, a “document” as manifested in a computer program has two distinct parts: The content — the text that the user has created in the document — and the structure — the encoding that allows the computer to recognize the meaning of the text.
A type of structural information within an electronic document sometimes comes in the form of metacodes. Standardized computer languages were developed that utilized metacodes to allow a computer to understand the meaning behind certain text that a user placed in a document. An early example of these languages is…