Microsoft is starting to remind us of Rocky Balboa, except that the battles are taking place in court and we've stopped expecting a last minute comeback. The latest punch to Redmond's gut comes from the U.S. Court of appeals for the Federal Circuit, which rejected Microsoft's request for a rehearing in the patent dispute with Canadian software developer i4i.

"This has been a long and arduous process, but this decision is a powerful reinforcement of the message that smaller enterprises and inventors who own intellectual property can and will be protected," said i4i chairman Owen Louden.

I4i first sued Microsoft back in 2007 alleging that an XML editor built into Word runs afoul of its patent. The Canadian company ultimately won the case along with a $290 million award, while Microsoft continues to lose appeal after appeal.

So is Microsoft finally ready to throw in the towel? Not hardly.

"We continue to believe there are important matters of patent law that still need to be properly addressed, and we are considering our options for going forward," a spokesperson for the company told Reuters.

Cue the Rocky theme.

Microsoft isn't yet finished fighting what it considers the good fight and has filed a second appeal in its patent case against i4i. According to Microsoft, the original judgment could set a dangerous precedent for future patent cases, TGDaily reports.

The dispute stems from August of last year, in which Microsoft was found guilty of violating an XML patent held by Toronto-based i4i. Microsoft was then banned from selling or importing into the U.S. any Word products capable of opening .xml, .docx, or .docm files containing custom XML. Microsoft would appeal, but lost its case in December.

In this second appeal, Microsoft contends that "the December 22 decision creates [significant conflicts] with established precedents governing trial procedure and the determination of damages, and we are concerned that the decision weakens judges' authority to apply appropriate safeguards in future patent trials."

i4i wasn't caught off guard by the latest appeal, saying "this next step of seeking a rehearing was anticipated."

It's official - the Global Language Monitor, which analyzes and tracks trends in language, has dubbed "Web 2.0" as the one millionth word. To qualify, potential words must appear 25,000 times in searches and be widely accepted. Web 2.0 fit that criteria, beating out Jai Ho, Noob, Slumdog, and Cloud Computing (among others) as the millionth English word or phrase.

The list has some linguists up in arms, who dismissed the whole thing as nothing more than a publicity stunt.

"I think it's pure fraud. I'ts not bad science. It's nonsense," Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters.

His and other similar opinions didn't seem to phase Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, who insisted that his method has merit.

"If you want to count the stars in the sky, you have to define what a star is first and then count," Payack said. "Our criteria is quite plain and if you follow those criteria you can count words. Most academics say what we are doing is very valuable."

Word up.