Judge Leonard Davis, a federal judge in Tyler, Texas ruled yesterday in favor of a small Toronto-based company called I4i. I4i had sued Microsoft alleging that the software company had willfully infringed on I4i’s patents on XML. XML is a tech acronym for Extensible Markup Language and is a technology that is broadly used in many software products to store and exchange data in human readable form. The judge decided that Microsoft knew about the patents and violated them anyway. He ordered Microsoft to pay $240 million in damages and to cease selling Word in 60 days.
Microsoft may appeal this decision or take some other action. For example, it could try to buy the company and end up owning the patent. It is unlikely that they would risk having to stop selling Word. I can’t imagine that scenario, but we will see in the next 60 days.
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