Microsoft's motion to stay an injunction has been granted; the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has allowed the company to keep selling Word as it appeals a patent ruling. The injunction had an effective date of October 10, but the motion to stay blocks the injunction until the appeal process is complete. If upheld, the injunction wouldn't stop existing users from using Word, but it could prevent the software giant from selling Word 2003 or Word 2007, the most common versions of Word currently on the market, and would require the company to significantly tweak Word 2010, which is slated for the first half of next year. The victory is a small one for Microsoft; the company still has the whole appeals process to go through.

"We are happy with the result and look forward to presenting our arguments on the main issues on September 23," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars.

Microsoft asked for the stay two weeks ago by filing an emergency motion. Canadian-based i4i, the company that owns the patent that Microsoft has been found to be infringing, claims in the lawsuit that its business shrank significantly when Microsoft added custom-XML support to Word.

"Microsoft's scare tactics about the consequences of the injunction cannot shield it from the imminent review of the case by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal on the September 23 appeal," said i4i chairman Loudon Owen in response to the court's decision. "i4i is confident that the final judgment in favor of i4i, which included a finding of willful patent infringement by Microsoft and an injunction against Microsoft Word, was the correct decision and that i4i will prevail on the appeal."

In August 2009, a federal court in Texas issued an injunction that gave Microsoft 60 days to stop shipping any recent version of Word, based on a patent that was found to cover the XML formatting used by the software. The ruling, which followed one from May 2009 where Microsoft was found to be infringing one of the patents and asked to pay up $200 million, was in favor of i4i. Word 2003 and Word 2007 were both found to be infringing on i4i's patent by using extensible markup language (XML) for encoding and customizing XML in a specific way (US Patent No. 5,787,449). Microsoft still feels that i4i's patents are invalid.