Not even 24 hours ago we heard the news that Microsoft lost their appeal to i4i — a small XML developers firm — and that the presiding judge decided to uphold the January 11th ban on Microsoft ’07. Yesterday the two most obvious choices for Microsoft were to pay up and forget about it or appeal again, risking losing more money and another court case. Microsoft however is choosing plan c. Plan C is simply selling new versions of Word ’03 and...

Chalk this up there on the board of weirdness for Wednesday morning. Apparently a judge in Texas has ruled that Microsoft violates several XML and custom XML opening patents held by Toronto-based i4i Inc. So what exactly does it mean? Well, technically Microsoft is now banned from selling Word in the United States. Though don’t expect that to last as Microsoft has already stated they plan on appealing the ruling which will of course give Redmond plenty of time to...

While the legallity of Miss. Thomas’s actions were always in doubt, the real focus of the cases, (at least in my point of view), was how many songs would she be fined for and how much?  Sadly, the judge and jury apparently don’t know the meaning of the word “reasonable” as the fine per song for Jamie climbed from the already proposterous $9,250 to a plain money grabbing $80,000 per song bringing the grand total to $1.92 million (24 songs x...

Remember that small trial that was hardly talked about? The one that had a few pirates that were accused of swapping a few files online? Ya, that case. You no doubt remember the judge, Tomas Norstrom, was accused of bias and conflict of interest as he was a member of a couple pro-copyright groups – more specifically the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property. Apparently in Sweden, such affiliations with...