Stop selling Word, Microsoft ordered
p2pnet news view | Products:- Following a lawsuit launched by a Canadian company founded in 1993 by Michel Vulpe, Microsoft has been ordered to stop to stop selling Word, one of its oldest applications.
The Toronto company, ironically named i4i, won the “permanent injunction” and damages and interest totalling more than $290 million, says McKool Smith, the company’s US lawyers.
Microsoft infringed i4i patent US Patent No. 5,787,499 issued in 1998 to cover software designed to manipulate “document architecture and content,” says a statement, going on:
“The software covered by the patent removed the need for individual, manually embedded command codes to control text formatting in electronic documents.”
Judge Leonard Davis, “ruled that Microsoft should pay i4i an additional $40 million for its willful infringement of the i4i patent,” says the law firm, stating:
“Microsoft also 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 in the case. The court also ordered Microsoft to pay $144,060 per day until the date of final judgment for post-verdict damages. Today’s permanent injunction 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.”
Microsoft has been told to comply with the injunction within 60 days.
McKool Smith – Judge Upholds Verdict, Enhances Damages, Issues Permanent Injunction Against Microsoft in Patent Infringement Lawsuit, August 11, 2009
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August 12th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
LOL
August 12th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Is this a joke? Or a trick to make us support copyright?
August 12th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
^^^
No, I think it’s just yet another prime example of how horribly stupid and incredibly useless intellectual property law is.
August 12th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
this is really absurd.
August 12th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
This is utterly ridiculous.
August 12th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
No good deed goes unpunished. Microsoft migrated from the type of proprietary document format the MS Word had been using since the mid-1980′s to a more acceptable standard format, and look at what they get in thanks for their efforts. I’m no fan of MS (after all, I bought MS Word Version 1, which shows you which platform *I* prefer!) but this just seems ironic.
August 12th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
One word:
Bwahahahahaha!
In case anybody wondered, I LOVE it when the citadels of corporate crapitalism get caught in their own bear-traps!
‘free-market’ system, my ass! — our economy is every bit as ‘centrally planned’ as the former Soviet bloc — it’s just that the ‘planning’ is done by corporate lobbyists, and enforced by way of IP law.
Way to go, proprietary software makers! — if Microsoft can’t sell Turd (oops, I mean ‘word’), that’s more market-share for openoffice.org (which will simply fork, if threatened with this type of thing.)
Boo-yah!
August 12th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
lol @ piratesoft
August 12th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Well since MS word is illegal and infringes someone else patent, I think the right thing for MS to do is refund everyone’s money.
August 12th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Canadian company’s lawsuit halts Microsoft Word sales in U.S.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Canadian+company+lawsuit+halts+Microsoft+Word+sales/1885793/story.html
Microsoft Corp. has been ordered to stop selling several versions of its popular word-processing software, Word, in the U.S. after losing a court battle with a Toronto-based company.
A Texas judge issued the injunction Tuesday and awarded small Toronto technology firm, i4i, more than $290 million US in damages, ruling Microsoft wilfully infringed on the company’s 1998 patent for software that opens up documents using the XML computer programming language.
290-Million! Wonder how much goes to the lawyers.
August 12th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Call it turd or whatever you like, but Microsoft Word is leagues ahead of OpenOffice. It might not suit your political ideologies, but it just is.
August 12th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Ugh, greedy patent trolls like i4i make me want to puke.
Considering how i4i makes software for Word itself (http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm), it’s obvious that seeking an injunction against Word is nothing but extortion, as it gains absolutely nothing from that except the opportunity to squeeze MS for money to let the problem go away.
August 13th, 2009 at 2:41 am
Reader’s Write on August 12th, 2009 at 5:48 pm wrote:
“Well since MS word is illegal and infringes someone else patent, I think the right thing for MS to do is refund everyoneâs money.”
NOOOO! You got it all wrong: Microsoft must “kindle” now.
That is: Remotely Delete all the documents that were produced with this infringing piece of software from the users computers. Americans be aware what happends on the next “patch day”!
After all, Microsofts Media Player has this obscure provision in its eula that they have the right to shut down certain functions of it when intellectual property rights holders demand that from them, maybe the word eula has some innocently looking short sentence in it that can “kindle” your word files too? ;-P
August 13th, 2009 at 8:15 am
@Readers Write
For once this is not just an act of patent trolling – i4i are a document management and publishing solutions company and actually use the technology in their products and have done so for nearly a decade!
August 13th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Use OpenOffice.
August 13th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
1. “Political ideologies”?
Bitch, please: For one thing, Openoffice.org can actually open WORD documents that Word itself.
Plus, it works with more document types.
Plus, the price is right. (You’d think a proprietary-software/microsoft troll would be familiar with their “how can you compete with free” slogan, but feh.
Okay, I’ll be nice — but then again, I DO only smash the trolls.
August 13th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Hint: any program that can’t even open files created by previous versions of ITSELF hardly qualifies as a worthy “industry standard”.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
“…any program that canât even open files created by previous versions of ITSELF hardly qualifies as a worthy ‘industry standard’.”
I’m not sure where you’re going here, Henry.
There’s only 1 example I can think of where a software CAN’T open documents created by a previous version – that being Quark not opening a document 2 versions behind. Everything else I’ve ever used (including Word) opens files from pretty well all previous versions. (And I’ve used everything.)
I’ve even opened many current Word version files using previous versions, often with no complaints from the software.
August 14th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Presumably though you have downloaded update packages or patches to make this possible, yes?
I am with Henry all the way on this one. Had a bit of an annoyance when working as a personal assistant for a guy who didn’t have the same office version as I and many hours were wasted trying to get two versions of Word or Access to talk to each other. PITA!
Personally, I always felt Word was a rip-off of Appleworks (my first home computer was a green screen IIc). I remember when the PC wp offering was WordPerfect which required a cheat sheet glued to the keyboard just to remember the commands for “open,” “save,” or “print” (vs. the intuitively obvious “open-apple”+”O,” “S,” or “P” in Appleworks); IMHO Word took a step back in that direction with the ’07 interface anyway – navigating the menus was totally counter-intuitive and I always spent 10 minutes hunting for basic shit; I find that I have no use for most of the new features anyway and find most of the stuff after XP unusable.
August 15th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
“Presumably though you have downloaded update packages or patches to make this possible, yes?”
The short answer would be “Yes, and No.”
As a desktop publisher and graphic designer, I naturally would make sure I installed the necessary add-ons to my own personal workstations. Bear in mind, not very many applications actually had such add-ons available to open the latest version with the previous one you’re still using. Microsoft was usually the one doing that for the Office and Works packages – All other companies didn’t even bother, maybe with the exception of a few Corel cases (although, CorelDraw was always the one that opened virtually every other format anyway).
I have, however, quite often opened Word documents created with a current version, using an earlier version with no add-ons, and no problems.
But, this is all talking about opening a LATER version with an EARLIER version.
Naturally, that scenario SHOULD have some snags.
What I couldn’t figure out was Henry’s remark about software that “can’t open a file created with a PREVIOUS version of itself”.
Henry?
August 17th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Actually, no – his statement was about difficulties with current software reading older files that were “created by a previous version of ITSELF.”
with EmPHAsis on the proPER word in accordance with incredulity and disgust.
August 18th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
@Voxleo:
Emphasis aside (and I don’t really know where you were going with that anyway), the statement doesn’t make sense. ALL softwares open files created by previous versions of themselves.