"A judge on Tuesday ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word, one of its premier products, in its current form due to patent infringement.

Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a permanent injunction that "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," according to a statement released by attorneys for the plantiff, [Toronto based] i4i".

Microsoft got bit by the very pet it's been nurturing.  Some of you may think I take some kind of perverse pleasure from this news.  And I do, but not for the reasons you might think.  Software patents are wrong. At its core, software is mathematics.  Mathematics cannot be patented.  Ideas cannot be patented.  Expressions of ideas cannot be patented.  Protection for the expression of ideas is well provided for through copyright.  The fact that these ideas are presented via an electronic computer ought not make them patentable.

Imagine, for a moment, a world where mathematics is patentable... 1 + 1 = 2 and "that will be $5 please".  Slope = rise / run.  Mathematically that's:

That's gotta be worth 200 bucks.  And, it's needed by everyone building roads, roofs, stairs and bridges etc.  In this world, if you can't afford enough mathematics you might as well not get out of bed in the morning.

Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants."  Science is built on the knowledge of those who have come before.  It has always been thus.  Could society have progressed if every generation, nay every individual, had to begin with the sum of human knowledge as it stood in the stone age?  This is precisely the world that the software patent lobby would have us inhabit.

So, am I happy to see Microsoft caught in this web?  You betcha.  Do I think the $277 million they've been ordered to pay will be enough to get them to see the light and fight to have these ludicrous patents overturned?  Not a chance.  But they will likely fight to have this particular patent invalidated and every brick removed from the wall helps.

The US courts and the US Patent and Trademark Office have recently offered some hope.  The US court of appeals decision on Bilski dramatically reduced the scope of eligible patent matter and the PTO has made it clear that they will be reviewing any number of questionable patents.

We're still a long way from where we need to be but there appears to be a flicker at the end of the tunnel.