Microsoft granted stay of Word injunction
Updated at 8:30 p.m. PDT with comment from i4i.
Microsoft has been granted a stay of a landmark injunction in a patent infringement case that would have required the software giant to stop selling its popular Word in its current form by next month.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Thursday granted Microsoft's motion for a stay, pending appeal, of an injunction issued in August by a federal judge that bars sales of Word that include a custom XML code found to infringe on patents held by i4i--the plaintiff.
"We are happy with the result and look forward to presenting our arguments on the main issues on September 23," Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said in a statement.
In response to the court's decision, i4i expressed confidence in its position and accused Microsoft of employing "scare tactics."
"Microsoft's scare tactics about the consequences of the injunction cannot shield it from the imminent review of the case by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal on the September 23 appeal," i4i Chairman Loudon Owen said in a statement. "i4i is confident that the final judgment in favor of i4i, which included a finding of willful patent infringement by Microsoft and an injunction against Microsoft Word, was the correct decision and that i4i will prevail on the appeal."
Toronto-based i4i sued Microsoft in March 2007 alleging that the Redmond,Wash.-based software giant violated its 1998 patent (No. 5,787,449) for a document system that eliminated the need for manually embedded formatting codes. In May, a jury ordered Microsoft to pay $200 million for infringing on a patent held by i4i.
In filing its formal appeal last week, Microsoft made a number of arguments for overturning the infringement finding, saying that the judge made several procedural errors and failed to live up to his role as "gatekeeper."
In addition to pursuing its appeal, Microsoft has other options, including creating a technical workaround, removing the XML function, or reaching a settlement with I4i.
I4i said earlier that it is not seeking to torpedo Word, but does want the infringing custom XML code removed.
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. Before joining CNET News in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers. E-mail Steven. 
If it were to work like this patent, the browser would ignore all the HTML tags reading only the content text and the equivalent of the CSS file would refer to positions within the HTML file for the browser to apply formatting. At this point, stripping out all the tags from the HTML file would make no difference to the result so long as the positions referenced in the 'CSS' file were adjusted to take account of where the text moved to.
On a personal basis: I don't see it's non-obviouslness, several people on here alone claim to have found prior art dating back to the early '80s and it's easy to conceive that the real reason it hasn't been more widely used is because it conveys no real advantage whlie at the same time being more complex to manage.
Great news to anyone with a brain. This patent is almost worthless, they couldn't license it to anyone if their life depended on it. But hey, they find that someone with cash in the bank has infringed on their property and suddenly the dollar signs are flashing before their eyes. The fact that they were even able to bully their way into a courtroom with it is a travesty to the integrity of the patent system.
you like patent trolls?
If this patent ever stays standing, it's going to be about as much use as the Marching Cubes patent.
Intellectual Property - Patent Cases filed in the Texas Eastern District Court before Leonard Davis
http://dockets.justia.com/browse/state-texas/court-txedce/judge-Davis/noscat-10/nos-830/
The courts there do "specialize" in intellectual property cases. The judges are experts in IP law and are willing to take on patent cases, unlike in some other jurisdictions which might prefer criminal cases or constitutional issues or whatnot. They've also structured the court system so you get a "predictable" schedule, while being close enough to a metropolitan to have a good jury pool.
Judge Davis himself has a background in technology (he was a computer programmer and systems analyst before becoming a judge) and attorneys in complex patent cases appreciate that.
So of course IP cases will flock to the district. But if you talk to attorneys who have been both plaintiffs and defendants in different cases there, they'd tell you that the courts there are fair to both sides.
The question is, will Ballmer vindictively strike back and do the Apple versus Palm thing, preventing i4i from latching onto Word?
(while MS Lawyers propose a new world wide Patent System). Just because
you are a behemoth should not grant the behemoth unparalleled access to
step on intellectual property from smaller companies. But that is the American
Way.
This is an important stayed motion to prevent their investors stock prices
from falling out of the sky. It is bad enough that Apple stock is shining
bright at $169.14 USD/share.
Back to school deals are a big part of MS's income and this was simply
bad timing for their marketing group.
Hopefully the judge will do the right thing (no, that does not mean take the
bribes from MS either).
If i4i infringed on an MS patent, there would be no reprieve. The court system
in the US is corrupt.
I especially like the part where he calls the judgement being appealed 'the final judgement'. Right, so the judgement on the appeal is what exactly? The final final judgement? Will we have a final final final judgement?
Why should people be allowed to claim a patent on plain logic how to do things? This means that if you would write a good software product sooner or later a bunch of lawyers will come and sue your a** off.
Lawyers should be outlawed.
- by StoshNick September 23, 2009 9:03 AM PDT
- Hi,
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(43 Comments)I scanned the patent quickly. As a C programmer, it seems clear (to me after a quick looky-loo at least) that the patent describes pointers as an abstract concept.
In C, you point into a separate data buffer (storage means) using a variable like: *Title while here the pointer variable is represented as something like: <Title>, or just an index into an array of pointers. This isn't even a full level of abstraction higher than C's pointer variables and arrays of pointers.
At the next level of abstraction they are describing indirection, which has been used in CPU designs that store code and data in separate segments. That has been going on for a very long time.
-Stosh