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Microsoft Corp suffered a defeat on Thursday when the Supreme Court upheld a record $290 million jury verdict against the software giant for infringing a small Canadian company's patent. The justices unanimously agreed with a U.S. appeals court ruling that went against the world's largest software company in its legal battle with Toronto-based i4i. The high court refused to adopt Microsoft's lower standard to replace the long-standing requirement that a defendant in a patent infringement case prove by clear and convincing evidence that a plaintiff's patent is invalid. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft had argued that a lower standard of proof involving...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 (UPI) -- Microsoft lost its appeal Tuesday against a lower court ruling that it had infringed the patent of small Canadian software company i4i, proving that the fight is not always to the strong. A three-judge federal appellate panel ordered the software giant to stop sales of its popular Word word processing program in its current form on Jan. 11 and to pay i4i $290 million. "In this case, a small company was practicing its patent, only to suffer a loss of market share, brand recognition, and customer goodwill as the result of the defendant's infringing acts,"...

Microsoft has been granted a stay of a landmark injunction in a patent infringement case that would have required the software giant to stop selling its popular Word in its current form by next month. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Thursday granted Microsoft's motion for a stay, pending appeal, of an injunction issued in August by a federal judge that bars sales of Word that include a custom XML code found to infringe on patents held by i4i--the plaintiff. "We are happy with the result and look forward to presenting our arguments on the main...

Now, I am not a lawyer. But, I've been reporting on IP (intellectual property) law issues for years now, so I know something about how these issues are resolved, and when I see that one attorney thinks there's an "easy technical work-around" for Microsoft's patent violation in Word, my alarm bells go off. There is no easy fix here, and, short of waving the white-flag, Microsoft may very well have to stop selling Word, and thus Microsoft Office, this fall. Here's why the "easy" solutions really don't work. First, there's the suggestion from the attorney that "All Microsoft has to...