According to the Texas court ruling, which already became final, 11 January Microsoft can not sell any copies in the U.S. text editor Word 2007, which would benefit from patent number 5,787,449. In the near future the manufacturer intends to resolve this issue as follows: the customers from the USA who will purchase after the deadline Word or MS Office 2007, the company will impose special conditions apply appropriate patches.

The website to download the materials we read that the patch contains fixes for safety and efficiency of the program until later in the bottom there is information referring to the judgments of the court and the rather vague statement, according to the updated software no longer includes "an optimized version of XML tags ". Only when we begin to delve into technical details, we learn that the Word is updated can also read these files, which use the process of forming the subject of features from the original version, but simply removes contained in these files you modified XML tags. This is not applicable extensions Ribbon interface in Office 2007 (Ribbon and Ribbon Extensibility XML).

Questions the extent to which published just patch also applies to versions of Office 2007 from outside the U.S. market, whether for such a measure is Microsoft's response to the final sentence of the court, and that the tags will be subject to liquidation of users, yet we could not get answers from the skilled worker company. Is also not known whether a program can arbitrarily remove the intellectual property of the user that was created for its use, while not causing any legal consequences.

Following that judgment Microsoft must not only pay compensation amounting to 200 million U.S. dollars Canadian i4i company, which filed a lawsuit for patent infringement, but also to promise her that the deadline set by the court of Word will be changed so that the patent is the subject of the process will no longer violated.

Patent claim in 1994 rather enigmatic describes "a method independent from each treatment structure and content of the document. Up to 20 descriptions of the details contained in the patent application suggests that they relate to the method modified by the user to save the formatting properties - such as Word 2007 document as a so-called Custom XML file inside the directory tree, running in DOCX format.