Judge Leonard Davis, a District Court judge in Texas, has issued an extraordinary 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 attorney’s statement from the plaintiffs.
This follows the decision from May earlier this year to make Microsoft pay $200 million to the holders of a custom XML tagging patent, i4i. Judge Davis ruled that Microsoft should pay i4i an additional $40 million for its willful infringement of the patent. Microsoft was ordered to pay slightly more than $37 million in prejudgment interest, including an additional $21,102 per day until a final judgment is reached.
A Microsoft representative said that the company is “disappointed” with the verdict and intends to appeal, claiming that the patent is invalid. This is hardly surprising considering Microsoft’s track record with patent infringements so far this year. In April Microsoft was ordered to pay $388 million when its activation methods were found to infringe on a Uniloc patent.
According to Neowin, Microsoft Office made $9.3 billion in the year 2008. A tidy sum, but do they really deserve to be hit with so many penalties for improving their software that is used people? Please comment below.
[...] case you may have forgotten, on August 11 Microsoft was ordered to stop selling Word, an injunction which was to start on October [...]