A $290m ruling against Microsoft has been upheld by a federal appeals court, which has also issued an injunction preventing the sale of certain versions of Word 2007 or Office 2007 software from January 11. The software giant had appealed a Texas jury verdict in favour of Canadian firm i4i, which claimed the software giant had infringed its patents for an XML editor. However, the jury said recent versions of Word did infringe on i4i's software patent. The ruling does not affect existing versions of Word 2007 or Office 2007 and Microsoft said it had been preparing for this decision and will remove the 'little-used feature' from Word by January 11. Customers with versions that include the feature will be unaffected by the decision.