AmiCOUR IP Group
Blog Comments

Did You Get the Word?
MS Word Risks
Legal Shut Down

December 16, 2009 - If you didn’t get the word, perhaps it was because the i4i v. Microsoft case hasn’t received the same media attention as the high profile NPT v. Rim wireless email case.  Nevertheless, the accused product, Microsoft Word software using XML, affects billions of documents and hundreds of millions of users. On May 20, 2009, a Marshall, Texas jury issued a two page verdict that Microsoft willfully infringed upon claims 14, 18, and 20 of USPN 5,787,449. The patent, officially assigned to Toronto based "Infrastructures for Information Inc.," teaches and claims a "Method and system for manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other." The idea is to have tagged data in one place and a document framework managed separately.  Despite Microsoft’s scrambling to get a new trial following the verdict, a two page August 11, 2009 Permanent Injunction gave Microsoft 60 days to stop the sale of Word 2003, 2007 and “Microsoft Word products not more than colorably different from Microsoft Word 2003 or Microsoft Word 2007 (collectively “Infringing and Future Word Products”).”  Read entire article.