I imagine this is how Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reacted when he heard about losing the legal appeal (Courtesy AP Photo/Lee Jin-Man)

I almost feel sorry for Microsoft. Recently, the company has had to contend with lawsuits (and threats of lawsuits) from several companies. Microsoft recently admitted that developers for the Chinese microblogging site Juku, which Microsoft owns, stole code from Plurk. Plurk executives are considering what steps to take next. On top of that, a small Missouri firm called Bing! Information Design has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Microsoft. The company claims to have used the Bing name since 2000 — years before Microsoft began work on its latest search engine technology.

Now Reuters reports that Microsoft has lost a legal battle with a company called i4i. I blogged about this dispute back in August. The crux of the matter is a patent infringement issue. The Toronto-based company i4i claimed that Microsoft violated a patent when it used a specific implementation of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) in its Word product. Word is one of the most popular word processing programs on the market today and part of Microsoft’s flagship Microsoft Office suite. In the initial case, the judge ruled in favor of i4i and placed an injunction on Microsoft, forbidding the company from selling copies of Word containing the XML implementation. Microsoft filed an appeal and while the court system took it under consideration the injunction was put on hold.

Microsoft lost the appeal. Company executives now say that Microsoft will remove all instances of the XML implementation in future copies of Word 2007 and Office 2007. They’d better do it quickly — the judge ruled that after January 11, 2010, Microsoft wouldn’t be allowed to sell any copies of Word containing the XML implementation. Microsoft says that later versions of the software don’t have the XML feature. The company will also have to pay more than $290 million in damages to i4i.

The nature of the feature itself is rather technical and has to do with separating the textual content of a document and the markup language that describes that text. I’m not sure I grasp all the details or exactly how Microsoft violated the patent. I wonder if the courts have a better understanding of XML than I do. I suspect not.