Microsoft Word violates patent?

A court in Texas has banned Microsoft from selling Word there. Allegedly Word violates a patent. This seems unlikely to hold up to much scrutiny. This judicial district is known to be the place to go to sue giant corporations for violating stupid patents. I think, and indeed hope, that this patent will be thrown out as obvious, and Microsoft will be allowed to continue to make giant tons of money.

I'm no fan of Microsoft overcharging and invading markets. But the patent system is broken, letting people hijack truly creative work and claim it as their own. In this case in particular, if the random company that holds this patent wins, then the XML standard is dead. Instead of having a standard format for documents we can all send to each other, they'd want a fee every time you save a file. Which none of us would pay - we'd just go back to having to pay attention to file formats. Until XML 2 comes along.

The patent office needs 3 times the funding they have, so they can reject stupid crap like this to begin with. And the patent and copyright law needs to be changed so that you actually have to invent something to patent it, not just wave your hands in the air and describe something cool. Makes me want to patent "method for delivering chemical for cancer treatment" and then sue the crap out of the drug companies.