The ruling, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit — which handles many patent and trademark cases — may signal the endgame of a long-running dispute between Microsoft and Toronto-based i4i Ltd. On August 12, a jury in a federal U.S. district court in Texas ruled in favor of i4i Ltd against Microsoft, for infringing a patent relating to the use of XML, or extensible markup language, in the 2003 and 2007 versions of Word. The jury slapped more than $290 million in damages on Microsoft and the court granted i4i’s motion for an injunction preventing the world’s top software company from selling versions of Word that contain the disputed patent technology. That injunction was stayed while Microsoft appealed the case with the Court of Appeals. According to Tuesday’s ruling, which upheld the injunction, Microsoft will be prevented from selling infringing versions of Word from January 11, 2010. However, industry experts say the most likely outcome is a settlement between the two parties that allows Microsoft to pay a royalty to i4i and continue selling Word.

Ars Technica parses a Microsoft statement:

“This injunction applies only to copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007 sold in the US on or after the injunction date of January 11, 2010,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars, meaning all copies of these products sold before this date (including Word 2003 and Word 2007) are not affected. “With respect to Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007, we have been preparing for this possibility since the District Court issued its injunction in August 2009 and have put the wheels in motion to remove this little-used feature from these products. Therefore, we expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for US sale and distribution by the injunction date.”

Robert X. Cringely wonders, is it just me or doesn’t that sound like an improvement?

The whole point of docx didn’t seem to be to help users, but rather to make life difficult for both Microsoft competitors and for users who decided not to upgrade from the previous Word versions that used only the .doc format.

Microsoft deserves to lose this one.

Techmeme points to Microsoft’s full statement and the discussion surrounding it.