Court Orders Microsoft to Stop Selling Word-based Products that Infringe a Patent

September 2, 2009

A US District Court judge found Microsoft guilty of patent infringement and asked the technology giant to stop selling its Word-based software or redesign the products to remove the infringed benefit within 38 days. Few weeks ago, the court also asked the company to pay $290 million damages to i4i, a Canadian software firm which filed the lawsuit.

According to court decision, the Microsoft Word products infringed i4i’s patented XML (also called as accelerated mark-up language), a technology for electronically encoding a data.

Because other technology giants such as Google and Apple Inc. are also using the XML technology, these companies will be affected by the court ruling.

Apple iWork, OpenOffice.org, and Google Documents—all key players in the market—are using XML technology.

According to a past interview, i4i officials said they are only after major corporations which illegally profit from their patented technologies.