The Court of Appeals has granted a motion filed by Microsoft to stay the injunction against its sale of Microsoft Word, which is more or less the most used piece of software in Microsoft’s Office suite of applications. For those who don’t know, Canadian company i4i has previously sued Microsoft over its use of custom XML. The judgment against Microsoft, which occurred in the eastern part of Texas (a region famous for being very steadfast in its patent judgments) ordered an injunction on the sale of Word and imposed a fine of $200 million. Microsoft will now not have to submit to the injunction, but will instead appeal its case. Further action will be taken after that.
The reason we didn’t cover this issue before is because the whole thing is confusing and probably won’t go anywhere. In an interview, the CEO of i4i tried to explain what exactly Microsoft did to infringe, and even his description was hard to follow. When the head of one of the teams in a legal battle struggles to convey why he was right to sue, you know that something is up. I suspect that Microsoft is ultimately going to win the appeal on its initial claim that i4i’s patent is invalid. Worse case scenario is that Microsoft starts paying i4i a fee to license custom XML until it develops its own, similar features for a later version of Office. It’d take something close to an act of God to stop Microsoft from selling Word.
