A U.S. federal court ruled that Microsoft Corp would have to pay more than $290 million in damages to Canadian software firm i4i Ltd for infringing a patent.

Toronto-based i4i, a privately held maker of software for manipulating documents, had claimed in a 2007 suit that Microsoft knowingly infringed one of its patents in its Word processing application and its Vista operating system.

The final judgment from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas followed a jury verdict issued in favor of i4i on May 20.

The judgment also permanently enjoins Microsoft from selling any products that can open a .XML, .DOCX or .DOCM file containing custom XML.

i4i will do its utmost to support custom XML users, which is particularly important to implement the ISO 29500 OOXML standard, Michel Vulpe, i4i's founder and an inventor of the patent, said in a statement.

Microsoft officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

(Reporting by Deepti Govind in Bangalore)

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