A court-ordered ban began Monday on the sale of US versions of Microsoft Word found to be in violation of a Canadian company's patents. But the US software giant skirted the prohibition with a patch issued Saturday that removed the offending code from the program, dpa reported.
Microsoft also said it would appeal the injunction issued in late December by a federal appeals court. A lower court had ordered the company to pay some 300 million dollars in damages to Canadian company i4i in May 2009 after finding that Microsoft had violated its patent on the XML markup language that allows text and data to be read across different platforms.
The firm wants a panel of 11 judges of the US Court of Appeals to review the case in the hope of overturning the original judgment.
In the meantime it said it has now removed the disputed feature from all available versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office on sale in the US.
"This process will be imperceptible to the vast majority of customers," the firm said in a statement.