Didn't see this posted earlier...
Judge Bans Microsoft from Selling Word
BANGALORE (Reuters) - A U.S. federal court's ruling in a patent infringement case could threaten sales of Microsoft Corp's popular word processing application.
A Texas district court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Canadian software firm i4i Ltd and filed an injunction preventing Microsoft from selling the 2003 and 2007 versions of Word.
The patent relates to the use of XML, or extensible markup language, which is used to make documents such as corporate earnings reports and news articles machine-readable and easily publishable on multiple platforms.
Apart from Microsoft's Word, XML is used by other word processing applications such as OpenOffice.
The court also ruled that Microsoft would have to pay more than $290 million in damages to i4i, which makes software for manipulating documents, for infringing the patent.
(full story)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...57B38M20090812