US News Microsoft Banned from Selling Word in US

Romek

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Microsoft has been accused of infringing patents owned by another company, i4i. The legal dispute centres around the way Microsoft Word handles certain kinds of documents.

i4i, based in Toronto, Canada, claimed that Microsoft "willingly violated" a patent granted in 1998 concerning methods for reading XML, a kind of programming language. XML allows users to customise the format of word-processing documents, enabling them to be read by various word-processing programs. Microsoft Word's ability to read and write XML documents is a crucial feature of the popular software.

Judge Leonard Davis, of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ruled that Microsoft had infringed i4i's patent, and ordered the software giant to pay $290 million (£176 million) in damages. This included $40 million (£25 million) for the wilful infringement of the patent, $37 million (£23 million) in pre-judgement interest, and a further $21,102 (£13,000) per day until a final judgement is reached.

 
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The Helper

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LOL I was just going to post this. What a public relations nightmare. Ordered to stop selling your most popular product. Wow.
 

Weegee

Go Weegee!
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If they actually have to remove Word then everyday school life is going to get a lot different :eek:
 

seph ir oth

Mod'n Dat News Jon
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If they actually have to remove Word then everyday school life is going to get a lot different :eek:

...notepad ftw!
 

Effane

Save/Load Code Tutorial
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US Copyright law is such a mess and the Patent law isnt much better. You can accidently create a similar method of doing something and never be able to verify that there is a patent for it, but if there is one then you are at great risk of being hurt severely. And all the burden of proof is on the company that is being sued.
 

sqrage

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Wow it's like Apple is paying off all the judges of the world or something.
 

ReVolver

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This is why I have OpenOffice :p
 

Miz

Administrator
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Bad move US government, don't you know all your systems run on Windows?

They better not remove Microsoft Word... I will be pissed off
 

ReVolver

Mega Super Ultra Cool Member
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Bad move US government, don't you know all your systems run on Windows?

They better not remove Microsoft Word... I will be pissed off
Time for them to move to Open Source OS.
 

Darthfett

Aerospace/Cybersecurity Software Engineer
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The argument doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Cnet Poster said:
If you read the patent description, it seems to cover any system where document style data is stored seperately from the document content. This will include style sheets of both HTML and XML, as well as any web page that pull data from a data base. Cnet.com probably infringes on this patent as well.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10308013-75.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Microsoft has appealed. I'm pretty sure they're going to get what they want.
 

C-Death

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Rapmaster

Ultra Cool Member
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Sounds like some of these patents could also cover the xml formats used in openoffice. The company just went after Microsoft because that's where the money is.
It's patent trolling. This i4i company likely doesn't have any serious products
 

KillerChi

New Member
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20
I'm glad patent laws exists as it has a good purpose, companies use it to fight each other. Sometimes when people do stuff like this, peoples lives are affected negatively.
 

ElderKingpin

Post in the anime section, or die.
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133
... why? im pretty sure A LOT of people use word, and A LOT of people are going to get pissed
 

bOb666777

Stand against the ugly world domination face!
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117
Watch as I'm going to download Word illegally. :D.

Oh wait I already have word...

Well then, watch as I continue using it regardless! :O
 

Azlier

Old World Ghost
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461
i4i, eye for eye. Lol.

Well, how are schools going to handle not being able to buy Word legally anymore?
 
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