The US Supreme Court has denied an appeal by Microsoft against a $290m verdict for infringing a small Canadian company’s patent.
The company, i4i, sued Microsoft in 2007, saying it owned the technology behind a text manipulation tool used in Microsoft’s Word application.
The technology gave Word 2003 and Word 2007 users an improved way of using a document’s contents.
Lower courts had said Microsoft wilfully breached the patent.
They ordered the world’s biggest software maker to pay up, and to stop selling versions of Word containing the infringing technology (Full report: BBC website).