The U.S. Federal Court of Appeals has upheld the jury verdict against Microsoft in its patent case with small company i4i, over the customizable XML used in Microsoft's extremely popular Word processor.
With the ruling upheld, Microsoft must pay i4i $240 million USD, as well as continue to sell Word 2003 and 2007 stripped of certain custom XML features.
"A reasonable jury could have ... [ read the full article ]
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240M is still a slap on the wrist to M$. I think its sad that someone sharing files on their pc would be hit with a 200M+ judgment that they could never pay back and is clearly stomping all over their rights for sharing a handful of songs for free. Also there is no conclusive evidence that they made anyone lose money as the corporate fat cats are pulling numbers out of their ass. Now you take a huge corporation that has SOLD hundreds of millions of copies of software for substantial profit that infringes on the little guy's patents for YEARS AND YEARS and has clearly completely devalued their property but they get charged with what would amount to a drop in the bucket. Our justice system is far too corrupt. They make harsh judgments against average people that would ruin their lives and give the corporate fat cats a slap on the wrist for doing the exact same thing and actually PROFITING from it by a large margin. M$ didn't just rob i4i they raped them and then donkey punched them when they were done but their punishment will not fit their crimes.
I agree with the punishment did not fit the crime, MS previous sales will also not get affected from this ruling as they already made their $ off it. i4i may as well be dead, as even after winning, what's to do now? I doubt they'll partner up with MS, and if they did, MS would just look for reasons to get rid of em anyways.
