Microsoft loses patent case in U.S. Supreme Court

[jon]

US Supreme Court refuses to throw out multimillion judgment against Microsoft in patent case

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court says Microsoft Corp. must pay a $290 million patent infringement judgment awarded to a small Toronto software company in a patent lawsuit.

The high court on Thursday refused to throw out the judgment against the world's largest software maker.

Toronto-based i4i sued Microsoft in 2007, saying it owned the technology behind a tool used in Microsoft Word. The technology in question gave Word 2003 and Word 2007 users an improved way to edit XML, which is computer code that tells the program how to interpret and display a document's contents.

The lower courts say Microsoft willfully infringed on the patent, and ordered the software maker to pay i4i $290 million and stop selling versions of Word containing the infringing technology. The high court upheld that judgment.