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[ChrisDeHerrera]

Microsoft Word Ban Sparked By 4-Page Complaint


Judge Leonard Davis, of U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas, on Tuesday ruled that Word—but not Vista and .Net—does indeed step on U.S. patent 5,787,449, which describes a "Method and System for Manipulating the Architecture and the Content of a Document Separately from Each Other," according to court records.

The patent is held by an equally obscure tech firm based in Toronto—i4i, Inc. The company describes itself as a developer of "collaborative content solutions."

In its complaint, originally filed March 6, 2007, i4i claimed Microsoft infringed its patent "by making, using, selling, offering to sell, and/or importing in or into the United States, without authority, Word 2003, Word 2007, .NET Framework, and Windows Vista."   (Source: -->Paul McDougall, InformationWeek ) 
Hmm, I wonder if this ruling will also ban other products that create DOCX and XML format files?  I'm specifically thinking of Windows Mobile which contains Word Mobile and Excel Mobile which read and write their desktop companion's file formats.  - Chris De Herrera

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Chris De Herrera
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[Gerard]

I'm wondering about this too, but sort of in the opposite direction. This i4i company sells a few products, one of which - http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm - is x4o, what seems to be a plugin for Microsoft Word, dependent upon Word to provide a word processing environment within which the i4i software plugin can function to assist editing using XML. Are they not rather shooting themselves in the foot with this measure?

And then there's the even more blatantly comical aspect; filing the suit in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas, a well established circus for legal shenanigans of all sorts. Got a whacko idea for a lawsuit to make hundreds of millions of dollars from some corporation? Go to East Texas, they'll set you right up. I wonder how close G.W. Bush lives to all this nonsense... and what ever happened to his god-given mission to end the needless costs to America of frivolous lawsuits? Seems something ain't quite right down there.
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Gerard Ivan Samija
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