Microsoft Appeals Word Injunction

August 19th, 2009 at 9:41 AM - News by Jeff Gamet

Microsoft filed an appeal on Tuesday requesting a stay in the injunction that will block the company from selling Word in the United States. The request comes on the heels of a court order requiring the company to halt sales of its Word application within 60 days because of patent infringements.

i4i sued Microsoft over Word's implementation of XML. According to i4i's suit, the company owns a patent that saves users from having to embed command codes in their documents to control text formatting, and Microsoft's XML formatting feature infringes on that.

The Judge's order blocks Microsoft from selling or importing into the United States any version of Word that can open documents containing custom XML which includes .XML, .DOCX and .DOCM files. While the injunction blocks the sale of Word in its current state, it doesn't prevent Microsoft from selling versions of the application that open XML documents as plain text.

Microsoft's filing claims that if a stay isn't granted it will suffer irreparable harm and that it's in the best interest of the public to let Word stay on the market. Those claims, it turns out, are the same ones that were rejected when the injunction was issued.

Whether or not the Appeals Judge agrees with Microsoft's arguments remains to be seen since he has not yet issued a ruling.