Judge Leonard Davis of the US District Court here in Texas has ordered a permanent injunction that says Microsoft can’t sell or import any MS Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or .DOCM files.
The ability to read and write XML documents is an integral feature of Microsoft Word of the most recent version of Word.
The Eastern District of Texas is where a lot of patent cases are filed. This suit was filed in March 2007.
The judge also ordered Microsoft to pay i4i, the patent holder more than $290 million in damages.
It is going to interesting to see how this pans out. I also wonder if Apple has the same issue with its Pages and TextEdit programs. Also there are a number of open source apps that can open and save to those formats.
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