Microsoft loses appeal on Word patent violation

[SenseiSteve]

Wow..all over the news today. Microsoft has lost an appeal on their Word patent violation and will have to suspend the sale of Word beginning Jan 11.

 

[Artashes]

WHAAAAAAAAT ????????? If not Microsoft, who the hell designed Word before them? 🙂

Something tells me they can "arrange" a deal with patent holder.


EDIT: Oh, wow, $300 million in penalties and possibly royalties arrangement. What a Christmas gift. 😀

 

[bobchrist]

The judgment should not block the future and its further development.

 

[SenseiSteve]

It doesn't block the future and further development ... it just impedes it, and raises the cost to consumers in the long run.

 

[handsonhosting]

The violation is that Word stepped on an XML patent in both Word 2003 & Word 2007. They were ordered to stop all sales of Word 2007 by January 11th 2010 *OR* remove the part of the code that violates the patent. Microsoft chose the 2nd part. They've been fighting this in an appeals court for quite some time (April 2009) and already had made the arrangements to remove the XML, DOCX or DOCM extensions from tehir software. It doesn't prohibit them from creating their own XML etc, but the problem was that they were using some XML technology on their import & modifications part of Word.

Microsoft had already removed the code, saying that few people ever really used it, and have products ready to ship. They also produced code to REMOVE the infraction from existing software, however they are not ordered to remove the code from already sold versions. It'll be interesting to see if they push that code out in a software update 🙂

I guess this is just one more reason to push the Microsoft Office 2010 (and Word 2010). Shouldn't be too long before those products are out of beta and on the shelves!

 

[SenseiSteve]

Well, I really liked the upgrade to 2007 ... can't wait for the release of 2010.

 

[handsonhosting]

I'm not sure I was all that fond of the 2007 update. It made some of my routine tasks a little more difficult in just that they changed the navigation of some things and moved things around. Now I spend a few minutes trying to get things the way I want. Overall, it was better .

I've not tried the 2010 beta at all yet, maybe one of these days.

 

[arbet]

Woah! Well, can't wait for the release of 2010 too!