Microsoft on Friday mounted a last-ditch effort to get a U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its ruling in a long-running patent infringement case involving its Word software.
Last month, the court denied Microsoft's appeal of an injunction in the case involving Toronto-based firm i4i, which last year won a $200 million court case against Microsoft pertaining to technology built into Word 2007 and Office 2007 that's used to customize XML code. That figure has since grown to $290 million in interest and fines levied by judge on the grounds of "intentional infringement."

The i4i patent describes a way to manipulate the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformation, by removing dependency on document-encoding technology.

After last month's ruling, Microsoft said it would remove the disputed feature from new copies of Word 2007 and Office 2007 and have them ready for sale in time for the court ordered Jan. 11 deadline. Nonetheless, Microsoft has insisted all along that it's not guilty of infringement and is taking one last stab at getting the judge to see things its way.