On August 13, an American court banned the Microsoft Corporation from selling ‘Microsoft Word’ on the grounds of patent infringement.

 

The i4i Company, the plaintiff, stated that Leonard Davis, a judge of a local court in the East District of the State of Texas, issued a permanent injunction against Microsoft. The local court banned the Microsoft Corporation from selling products opened in the forms of .XLM, .DOCX or .DOCM in the United States.

 

In March 2007, the i4i Company of Toronto brought a lawsuit against the Microsoft Corporation accusing the Microsoft Corporation of infringing on its patent (No 5,787,449) that the company invented in 1998. The patent is a system for “the separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformations.”

 

In May 2009, a federal jury of the U.S. Federal Court in the Eastern District of Texas Tyler Division adjudicated that the function of the customized tag of the .XLM document embedded in ‘Microsoft Word 2003’ and ‘Microsoft Word 2007’ infringed upon the i4i Company’s patent. The Microsoft Corporation was required to pay i4i $200 million in compensation.

 

(Source: Intellectual Property Protection in China)