The issue of Word's patent purity and whether Microsoft will have to pay $290 million to a tiny Canadian company because it allegedly wasn't so virtuous is now in the lap of three judges at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC.

Microsoft had the expedited hearing of its appeal Wednesday and their honors are expected to be months at deciding who's right, Microsoft or i4i.

As much as we would have liked to go, we couldn't and apparently most of the rest of the press couldn't either, although interest in the case reportedly forced the hearing into a capacity house courtroom, so a cogent description of what, if anything telling, happened is hard to come by.

Ah, well, all the action's really in the briefs anyway. We loved the part in the Microsoft brief where Michel Vulpe, the inventor of the i4i patent validated his patent - unsupported by any corroborating evidence - with the testimony that he lied to his investors - including the Canadian government - about the date of its conception, pushing it back a year past the point it appears he had already sold it. Microsoft is dependent on the testimony of one of Vulpe's former colleagues for the alleged timetable since Vulpe destroyed the original code.

Anyway, the appeals court reportedly gave the sides way more than the usual 15 minutes each to speak their piece and answer questions.

Remember the threat of a temporarily stayed injunction hangs over Word and the Word-bearing Office and Microsoft may be forced to conjure up a technical workaround that it doesn't want to have to do. And neither does HP or Dell, which are sticking up for it.

Microsoft, which is shooting for at least a new trial if not a reversal of what it says is a "miscarriage of justice," claims the i4i patent isn't valid and anyway it doesn't infringe and that the notoriously plaintiff-leaning Texas court that enjoined Word must have been hitting the brandy tumbler - figuratively speaking of course - before it interpreted the patent claim and again before imposing such gargantuan damages for an arcane feature practically nobody uses.

i4i, expressing confidence it will prevail, put out a statement after the hearing saying that Microsoft used the same arguments in Texas and failed as though new ears won't make a smidge of difference.

i4i claims to be "suffering irreparable harm every day" the injunction's not in place, contending that its obscure XML widgetry has graduated to a "must have" and it's losing out on a spike in market demand.

However, according to Reuters, the court apparently had trouble with the way Texas calculated the damages. Then again it reportedly had trouble swallowing the idea that Microsoft never read the i4i patent.