Microsoft side-steps recent court ruling

Microsoft recently lost a court appeal to a Toronto based company i4i. The terms of this loss stated that Microsoft must stop selling Office 2007 after January 11th because Microsoft infringed on some XML handling algorithm.

Luckily, since the appeal began, Microsoft started preparing for the future and began work on making the required fixes to Office 2007. The removed feature was the support for reading custom-generated XML within DOCX, DOCM and pure XML files. Office will still be able to open files with this code inside but it will no longer be displayed to comply with the infringement claims. And since these terms apply only to software sold after January 11th, it is unlikely that a patch will be released. Also, Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2010 are not subject to those terms because they didn’t implement the technology at the height of i4i’s lawsuit.

Unfortunately, Microsoft will still have to pay the $290 million in damages to i4i as was reported Tuesday but they likely will be seeking to reverse that verdict. Microsoft claims to fight this verdict to levels as high as the US Supreme Court.

Read [Electronista]