London : After losing a software patent case brought by i4i last year, Microsoft is unable to ship copies of Word and Office with "Custom XML" features in the US from 11 January 11.

ComputerWorld notes that most versions of Microsoft Office disappeared from Microsoft's online store in the US on Monday as the injunction against the use of Custom XML came into effect.

Last year, i4i (Infrastructures For Information), a small Toronto software house, won a court case against Microsoft after claiming that functions in Microsoft Word infringed on its patent. The injunction now prevents Microsoft from selling copies of Word in the US that include the infringing technology.

Microsoft said it has been preparing for this eventuality since the jury verdict went against it on August 11, and had "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."

It had also sent its OEM partners a 2007 Microsoft Office Supplement Release (October 2009) — "Required Word 2007 Update" (12.9MB) saying: "All new PCs built on or after January 11, 2010, in the United States must have this patch." The patch strips out the Custom XML feature.

The injunction does not apply to copies of Word that are already in use.

It's not clear what effect the injunction will have on sales of Microsoft Word. Microsoft's note on the OEM partner release says:

"The ability to handle custom XML markup is typically used in association with automated server based processing of Word documents. Custom XML is not typically used by most end users of Word."

Corporate users

It could affect some corporate Office users if they have started using the new Office file formats — in this case, docx — and if they do server-based processing of these docx files using custom XML (that is they have created and defined their own tags using Extensible Markup Language). But it's not clear how anyone would know how many companies this affects.

Microsoft's attitude may appear somewhat at odds with the statements made by its lawyers (PDF at TechFlash) when they appealed the injunction: "If left undisturbed, the district court's injunction will inflict irreparable harm on Microsoft...not only of Word but also of the entire Office suite.

— The Guardian News& Media Ltd