Software giant likely to cut deal with Toronto firm following U.S. ruling
Microsoft has lost its bid to overturn a patent ruling related to its popular Word software that would force it to either pay royalties to a small Toronto company or pull the offending product from store shelves. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit today upheld a previous lower court ruling in favour of Toronto-based i4i Ltd., which claims it has a patent on XML, or extensible markup language, technology contained in 2003 and 2007 versions of Microsoft’s popular word processing software. The court also granted i4i’s request for an injunction to prevent Microsoft from selling the offending versions of Word in the United States unless a deal between the two sides is reached.