May 26, 2009 - A jury has ruled that Microsoft must pay $200 million to Canadian software company i4i as a "reasonable royalty" for infringing i4i's U.S. patent 5,787,449.
The patent-in-suit covers a method for "manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other" and Microsoft used the patented technology in certain versions of Word 2003 and 2007.
According to Bloomberg, the $200M verdict is the fourth largest jury verdict in the United States this year to date and the second-largest jury award in a patent infringement lawsuit.