Microsoft filed another appeal on Friday in its patent dispute with i4i, but said it will comply with the injunction against Word that is set to go into effect on Monday.
The software maker asked for either a hearing before the full appeals court or for the partial panel that heard its case to grant it a new hearing. A jury in 2009 ruled that the custom XML feature in Office 2007 infringed on an i4i patent, and a judge imposed monetary damages and issued an injunction barring sales of Office containing the offending feature.
"Today Microsoft filed a petition with the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit for both panel rehearing and rehearing en banc in the i4i case," Microsoft said in a statement.
"The petition details significant conflicts we believe the 22 December decision creates with established precedents governing trial procedure and the determination of damages, and we are concerned that the decision weakens judges' authority to apply appropriate safeguards in future patent trials."
For more on this story, see Microsoft seeks another hearing in I4i case on CNET News.
Talkback
Typical Microsoft. If you lose a judgment to a much smaller company, simply send your army of high-priced staff lawyers to tie them up in court until they either go out of business or die of old age. Quite a lot of trouble for them to go to over a "little-used feature", wouldn't you say?
jw
that it is only the informed few who understand how Microsoft conduct their business.
I do not actually know anyone, in the flesh that is, who know anything other than that Windows and Office are, de facto, on their computers; and they mostly just accept all the problems as facts of life, and call for help when everything grinds to a halt. (Somewhat like my mother used to call for repairs to her refrigerator when I was young - regularly. My father used to talk about built in obsolescence, I guess a modern version of this is a Windows laptop. Not doing well, go out and buy another, and so on.)
People generally just accept that their Vista laptops are virtually unusable for 20 minutes or so after start up with all the disk thrashing that goes with Windows, granted that Window 7 is better.
Perhaps understandably, they have little or no knowledge or interest in Microsoft's business tactics or, generally, in understanding that they should have a choice.
In other cases, I have installed Linux for inept users and they have managed for much longer periods without further help once they have understood the differences. The two flies in the ointment, so to speak, are printer/scanner support and failure to read recent Microsoft document formats properly, and we all know why that is.
Funny you should mention that Moley. I recently got a document from a friend in the Philippines, with an odd extension. Linux couldn't open it, so I wrote him back and asked him to send it in a different format and he said he didn't know how to change it. He also said he had never heard of Linux.