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 US 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, i4i.

Microsoft did not immediately reply to request for comment but said in a statement that it planned to appeal the verdict.

Toronto-based i4i sued Microsoft in March 2007 alleging that the software giant violated its 1998 patent (No 5,787,449) for a document system that eliminated the need for manually embedded formatting codes.

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