In a brief order file late Thursday, a federal court of appeals has given its approval to Microsoft's appeal for a stay of the contentious Word injunction, which would have barred Microsoft from selling the present versions of its Word 2003 and Word 2007 software after October 10.

The injunction was ordered on August 11 by US District Court Judge Leonard Davis, who found Microsoft guilty of infringement of a patent held by i4i, a Canadian software developer. Along with the injunction, Judge Davis had also asked Microsoft to pay i4i over $290 million in damages and interest. The patent infringement lawsuit was file in
2007 by i4i.

Granting Microsoft's request for the suspension of the injunction, the federal appeals court said: "Without prejudicing the ultimate determination of this case by the merits panel, the court determines based upon the motion papers submitted that Microsoft has met its burden to obtain a stay of the injunction."

In its August 18-filed request for a stay of the injunction, Microsoft had pleaded that the ban would cause "massive disruptions" to the company's sales, and cause inconvenience to the users of Word technology, especially large companies and government agencies. The Word software allows users to create custom XML documents, whereby templates can be created to tag certain words and manage them in a database.