Remember last month when Microsoft lost its second attempt to appeal the patent infringement case it lost to Canada’s i4i over custom XML support in Microsoft Office? Well, now the Redmond software giant has suffered another blow: a federal court has rejected Microsoft’s request for a rehearing of the patent infringement case. The rejection means that Microsoft won’t be able to start this case over from the ground up…although it still has the option of attempting to appeal the original case to the Supreme Court.
“This has been a long and arduous process, but this decision is a powerful reinforcement of the message that smaller enterprises and inventors who own intellectual property can and will be protected,” said i4i chairman Owen Louden, in a statement.
The i4i infringement case has been a thorn in Microsoft’s side: Canada’s i4i brought the suit in 2007, alleging custom XML support in Microsoft Word infringed on their patent 5,787,449, and claimed Microsoft knew about i4i’s technology before rolling out the feature in Office…which meant the company was willfully infringing on the patent. Microsoft claimed it had done nothing wrong, but a Texas jury disagreed, awarding i4i a $200 million judgement and ordering Microsoft stop selling Microsoft Word unless it removed the infringing technology. Microsoft stripped the capability out of Microsoft Word 2007: that means the program can no longer open documents that contain custom XML.
“We’re disappointed with the decision,” said Microsoft director of public affairs Kevin Kutz, in a statement. “As far as next steps, we continue to believe there are important matters of patent law that still need to be properly addressed, and we are considering our options for going forward.”
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