Microsoft has been hit with one of the largest patent awards on record, as a jury on Thursday ordered the software giant to cough up $388 million on claims that is misappropriated its technology.

The jury found that Microsoft violated anti-piracy patents held by Uniloc, a security vendor that. Uniloc sued Microsoft in federal court in Rhode Island in 2003 over product activation technology used in Windows XP, Office XP, and Windows Server 2003.

A Microsoft spokesman told news agency Reuters that the company plans to appeal the verdict. We believe that we do not infringe, that the patent is invalid, and that this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, the spokesman said.

Microsoft plans appeal against the company.

Just last month, Microsoft reached a patent settlement with navigation software developer TomTom. TomTom agreed to make unspecified payments to Microsoft in order to settle Redmond's claims that Linux code used in TomTom's products contained patented Microsoft technology -- specifically, the FAT file system.

Microsoft Software Patent