Microsoft Told to Stop Selling Office Before January 11

[Rob Williams]

It's the giving season, and we saw a major example of that last week when the FTC slapped Intel with a barrage of accusations. This week, it's Microsoft on the receiving end, with the gift-giver being the US Court of Appeals. Earlier this year, XML specialist company i4i won a suit against Microsoft for infringing on one of their XML technologies, which resulted in a quick halting of Office sales, but not for long.

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[b1lk1]

This still fully smells like money and I would be very surprised if there had not already been a behind the scenes offer that was turned down. While M$ doesn't deserve to infringe on patents freely because they are a giant company, they should just remove the XML feature completely and compensate effected users. I bet it would be cheaper in the long run to do this instead and i4i will regret not playing ball sooner.

 

[Kougar]

After reading Engadget's article, I'm going to agree with them that this isn't a money issue. Keep in mind if it was they could have had Microsoft fined a pretty penny for all the past sold products with their XML code in it, but I've only seen them mention the injunction to halt future sales. http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/22/microsoft-loses-patent-appeal-word-and-office-to-be-barred-from/