By Andrew Thomas at TG Daily:
Microsoft has moved quickly and issued a patch for Office 2007 to make Word comply with a court ruling.
The Office OPK Master Kit Download removes custom XML editing facilities from the product following legal action by tiny Canadian outfit i4i. While, predictably, many observers are applauding the victory of the David vs Goliath contest, in which a Texas court ordered MS to hand over $290 million in damages for copyright infringement, the situation isn’t quite that simple.
Loudon McLean Owen, President of i4i, is also managing partner of venture capital outfit McLean Watson, the company behind i4i and sixteen other IT companies with a total capital under management of $160 million. Owen is a direct descendant of its founder, Gillean McLean, who founded the company in Indonesia back in 1820. The company says its preferred size of investment ranges from one to five million bucks.
i4i originally sued Microsoft in 2007, claiming that the XML editor built into Word 2007 and 2003 is in breach of its patent. In August, the US District Court for Eastern Texas found in favor of i4i, against which Microsoft appealed. That appeal was thrown out yesterday.
“In this case, a small company was practicing its patent, only to suffer a loss of market share, brand recognition, and customer goodwill as the result of the defendant’s infringing acts,” the court ruled.
The ruling means Microsoft can’t sell versions of Word in the US that open documents saved in the .XML, .DOCX, or .DOCM formats that contain custom XML that manipulates a document’s content and architecture separately. Custom XML is generally used by large corporates to link company data to Word documents.
According to Microsoft, “With respect to Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007, we have been preparing for this possibility since the District Court issued its injunction. Therefore, we expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for US sale and distribution by the injunction date.”
