It appears that one of the world's most used computer programs may find itself excommunicated from its country of origin. On Tuesday, a Texas judge ruled that Microsoft will no longer be able to sell Word in the United States. Next you're going to tell me that apple pies have been outlawed.

The ruling came when i4i Inc. filed an injunction against Microsoft concerning XML patents. Reportedly, the injunction “prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML." Microsoft apparently has 60 days to comply with the court ruling, which also asks Microsoft to pay some $290 million in damages, but I can't see that happening. There's just no way that they're going to pull MS Office off of any store shelves. I'm not sure what i4i is hoping to accomplish here either. According to the complete injunction, which you can read here, this issue tracks all the way back to the 2003 edition of the program, so why has it taken so long for this company to file a complaint against Microsoft?

XML is almost a must for writing these days as the formatting allows for documents to be read on multiple word-processing programs. And you know, I get that these guys are probably doing this just to earn a few bucks. It's the times. I understand. But do they really think that Microsoft is in the business of caving into the demands of companies nobody has ever heard of? How do you even prove that someone infringed on a patent when it comes to something like this anyway? I imagine Microsoft will be fighting this pretty hard as I'm sure they're not exactly eager to part with nearly $300 million this time of year. Truthfully, I'm more concerned about how much time I'm going to be wasting scanning in hand-written documents to post on the internet. Do they even make paper any more?

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