A U.S. district court judge in Texas ruled against Microsoft on Wednesday in a law suit over a patent infringement in the companies software product Word. The ruling takes affect in 60 days and would ban sales of Microsoft Word versions 2003 and 2007. It also hits the software giant with a $290 million fine in damages.

These versions of the Word product contain particular use of XML which infringes on a patent filed by i4i Ltd, a small firm in Canada. Microsoft states that they plan to appeal the patent citing that they “do not infringe” and that the i4i patent is not valid. Microsoft also has a new version of Word coming out next year as part of their Office 2010 suite, which does not contain the infringing XML component. Microsoft could also simply remove the particular XML portion of the existing Word applications to comply with the court ruling for future sales.

Sony’s patent application for a haptic touchscreen composed of “tactile pixels” shows former Sony Computer Entertainment chief Phil Harrison as the inventor. It also has a bunch of references to potential use in “a game device” and to “game events,” so it seems fairly obvious that it was developed as an idea for PSP.

The patent app describes a haptic feedback system that seems pretty complicated. The pixels themselves are capable of moving up and down, providing feedback to user actions. It’s certainly interesting, but we’re not gonna hold our breath waiting for this to hit the consumer market anytime soon. We wouldn’t mind being wrong though.

Gibson Guitar Corp. is accusing Activision of violating one of their patents with the popular Guitar Hero series of video games. The patent in question is owned by Gibson since 1999 and involves a system that would let a musician “virtually” participate in a pre-recorded concert while wearing a head-mounted 3D display with speakers. The music played on the instrument would then be recorded on a separate track and available for playback with the rest of the tracks to simulate playing in a concert.

Activision’s Guitar Hero does have a similar premise, however it’s played on a “pretend” plastic guitar and is a game where the player tries to mimic notes in concert represented on the monitor by graphical musicians in a concert. Activision is disputing the claim that they infringe upon Gibson’s patent and is asking the federal court to provide an official ruling.

A new patent application from Samsung was recently released by the USPTO showing what the company is describing as a mobile phone for media with a self-cradling function. The design shows an angled hinge in the middle of the candy-bar style phone which allows it to rotate and provide an angled display on top and an input pad on the bottom for some type of multimedia and/or gaming functionality.

Samsung also described is a pair of slide-out, detachable stereo speakers, a camera next to the display for possible video conferencing and a “plurity” of keys with a four-direction keypad.

A new patent application showed up recently on the USPTO website from Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry mobile devices. The application shows a slider phone with a hidden QWERTY keyboard behind and looks an awful lot like some mobile handsets we’ve seen recently from HTC.

The device is described by RIM as a Hybrid Portrait-Landscape Device With Trackball Navigation and Qwerty Hideaway Keyboard. I don’t think we’ve seen any devices from HTC that have a trackball which is somewhat of a trademark of RIM, but is that enough to make this a novel invention? We’re also wondering if this could be the new touchscreen BlackBerry that we’ve been hearing rumors about for quite some time now.

A recent patent application filing at the US patent office by Sony Ericsson reveals what looks to be a PSP phone. This does kinda’ make sense since everything is moving toward integrating with a mobile phone lately. Also, it’s been difficult to take a traditional mobile phone and integrate games with it, so why not go the other way around and integrate a phone into an existing mobile game design.

It looks like that’s what Sony Ericsson is up to. The PSP is already designed well as a portable game system with the wide screen layout and buttons on either side. In this case they have pictured a rotating screen which would be key for getting the wide screen for gaming, watching movies, etc. It looks like the potential PSP phone could also be used as …