Thaindian News

Microsoft, the worlds largest manufacturers of operating system software, has been ordered to stop selling it’s MS Word product and pay $290 million in damages to a Canadian software company by a US Federal court.

The order will take effect in 60-days time after the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas followed a May 20 jury verdict issued in favor of i4i Ltd., a privately held software company.

The Toronto-based company claimed in a 2007 suit that Microsoft had knowingly breached i4i’s 1998 XML patent in its word processing application and Vista operating system software.

The jury found in favor of the Canadian company and today the court not only fined the software giant, but also enjoined Microsoft from selling any products that can open a .XML, .DOCX or .DOCM file containing custom XML.

The injunction also prevents Microsoft from selling or demonstrating Word, unless any version of Word demonstrated only imports .XML files as plain text.

Michel Vulpe, i4i’s founder and an inventor of the patent, said “i4i will do its utmost to support custom XML users, which is particularly important to implement the ISO 29500 OOXML standard”.

Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said: “We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid. We will appeal the verdict.”

Sales of Office software, of which Word is a key component, are a mainstay of Microsoft with the Office division earning profits of over $9 billion in the first three quarters of this year on sales of $14.3 billion.

Last month Microsoft was ordered to pay some $388 million in damages for infringing on patented anti-piracy technology from Uniloc. Microsoft is currently appealing that decision.