Daily News : Microsoft Office

Ah, you gotta love patent cases. Microsoft was sued by a company for infringing on a patent that allowed for the processing of custom XML in Word documents. A jury awarded the plaintiff $200 million and required Microsoft to stop selling Word until the offending code could be removed. Since such changes would take months to complete, Microsoft filed an appeal requesting time to rework the Word program. The court has now granted Microsoft's request.

In the lawsuit, i4i alleges Microsoft willingly infringed its patent on processing custom XML when Microsoft included the technology in Word 2003. i4i, which sells software add-ons to Word for using custom XML, has said its business shrank significantly when Microsoft added custom-XML support to Word.