i4i Gets Word Injunction

A motion filed by Microsoft seeks to delay enforcement of an injunction ordering Microsoft to stop selling any current and future Word products that use a feature involved in a patent dispute while Microsoft appeals the judgment. The injunction is part of a final judgment by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in a long-running patent infringement case brought against Microsoft by i4i, a Canadian software company, over particular aspects of Word’s use of custom XML. The injunction is scheduled to take effect on Oct. 10, 2009, 60 days after it was signed.

The Patent Infringement

The District Court’s final judgment followed a May 2009 jury verdict and found that Microsoft had willfully infringed on i4i’s United States patent 5,787,449 (the ‘449 patent), and that the ‘449 patent was valid and enforceable.

The ‘449 patent is titled “Method and System for Manipulating the Architecture and the Content of a Document Separately from Each Other.” According to i4i, generally a “document” has two distinct parts: the content or the text and the structure or the encoding that allows the meaning of the text to be recognized. A type of structural information within an electronic document sometimes comes in the form of “metacodes,” which allow a computer to understand the meaning behind certain text that a user placed in a document. The ‘449 patent describes a reliable method of processing and storing content and metacodes separately and distinctly. The data structure primarily responsible for this separation is called a “metacode map.”