Ban on sales of Microsoft Word upheld

[UKDarkstar]

Ban on sales of Microsoft Word upheld


Microsoft has failed in its attempt to dismiss a court case that would stop it selling Word.

The software giant appealed against a ruling which found it took code used in Office from Canadian company i4i.

With the failure of the appeal Microsoft must now pay i4i damages of $290m (£182m) and comply with an injunction ending the sales of some versions of Word.

The injunction is scheduled to go into effect on 11 January.

Microsoft said the ban would prohibit the sale of all available versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office software from the date that the injunction comes into force.

Versions of the software sold before that date, including Word 2003 and Word 2007, will not be hit by the ruling.


Full story : HERE

[wagnerk]

Oh well, at least Office 2010 (the beta anyway) isn't affected:

"Beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are available now for downloading, do not contain the technology covered by the injunction," Microsoft added.

-Ken

[dmarsh]

Its unfortunate MS didn't do more to stop software patents becoming law in the first place, now we have loads of these cases, frankly its a mess !

I'm no legal expert but I would have thought copyright and reversing laws would have been enough.

It's a far larger and more important issue than where you get your next copy of word from...

[LordMoolyBap]

I wonder whether this has been a publicity mistake for i4i. I certainly feel a strange dislike for them now...
Then again with the money they will probably stand to make they may not care either way!

[dmarsh]

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Software patents generally only benefit large coporations and lawyers...

Apple and MS benefited from large amounts of prior art that was not patented, the inventors in many cases died poor.

When will people wake up... does someone have to patent your DNA before it happens ?

[LordMoolyBap]

Originally Posted by dmarsh

Live by the sword, die by the sword

Very true!!

[zxspectrum]

Well the only thing i can see is that money they have been fined will be pushed onto us, the consumer. But i doubt ill be buying word again, as ive discovered open office which is free and to be honest , very good. And you get all the trimmings, that office can offfer you but they are called different things, word is called writer etc. And the best thing is, it will work with office extensions, so you can carry on regardless. win win.

Ed

[nugget]

Originally Posted by dmarsh

Its unfortunate MS didn't do more to stop software patents becoming law in the first place,

I could be wrong but I thought that MS were one of the biggest pushers for getting software patents.

Originally Posted by dmarsh

When will people wake up... does someone have to patent your DNA before it happens ?

Not even then, as long as there's money to be made for someone.

BTW, how do you feel about licensing the rights to your own DNA back? I got the patent approved last week.

[JonnyMX]

Originally Posted by dmarsh

When will people wake up... does someone have to patent your DNA before it happens ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(novel))

[Alex399]

Its a company pleaing for lots of money as thats all they want out of this is money, its not like vast amounts of work and effort in the form of coding has been copied delibratley, perhaps they just happened to have some of the same lines of code in there programming, I Imagine this will happen more frequentley as time goes on.

IMO its just simply i4i exploiting these ridiculous laws, but don't ask me what kind of law system would you have put in place because I don't get paid to do those kind of things I just think it should be seriously thought over.

Just like Dmarsh said "Live by the Sword! Die by the Sword!"

A bit off topic post but if we had an avatar award Darkstar has my vote, that really cracked me up when I saw that cat in the hat Hilarious!