Patent and Trademark Law

Two hundred and forty million dollars. That’s how much was awarded against Microsoft and to the plaintiff in i4i Limited Partnership and Infrastructure for Information Inc. (i4i) v. Microsoft Corp.¹ at the district court level, and recently, on Dec. 22, 2009, affirmed on appeal by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The award included $40 million in enhanced damages and an injunction regarding future sales effective Jan. 11, 2010. How many hurdles did i4i need to jump to get there? Many, as this case review reveals.

The Patent and Rulings Below

On July 28, 1998, i4i was issued U.S. Patent No. 5,787,449 (“the ’449 patent”) which is directed to “add-on” software for Microsoft Word and specifically to “markup languages” like XML which adds “tags” or “metacodes” around the text indicative of the text’s appearance or content, e.g., whether it’s an address, or person’s name, or should be in bold or italics. The ’449 patent claims an improvement for editing documents containing markup languages like XML where the documents’ content and metacodes are stored separately, which allowed users to work solely on a document’s content or its structure. The patent’s specification defines “metacode” as “an individual instruction which controls the interpretation of the content of the data.” i4i alleged that Microsoft infringed claims 14, 18, and 20 of the “449 patent by making, using and selling Word products capable of processing or editing custom XML.”