By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter

A Seoul court ruled that the world's largest software giant Microsoft illegally used patent-covered software technology developed by a Korean professor, ending an eight-year-long legal battle between the scientist and the U.S. company.

The Seoul High Court Tuesday ruled that Microsoft partially violated the patent of Prof. Lee Keung-hae, a professor teaching computer science at Korea Aerospace University in Gyeonggi Province.

Lee had the patent for technology that automatically switches the linguistic input mode between Korean and English in the company's word processing software, ``Word.''

In the ruling, the court said ``Given that the language switching system adopted by Word has the same mechanism as the technology the professor had developed, the U.S. company has infringed on the patent.''

As the ruling came in favor of the professor, Microsoft is likely to pay huge amount of money in compensation to the software architect. In addition, the controversial language system could be removed from the MS Office software.

The court will now determine damages in the case.

In the first lawsuit filed in 2000, Lee sought 40 million won in compensation but lost. Following that trial, Microsoft sued the professor in 2001, asking the court to acknowledge that Lee's technology was not patented. But the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that Kim was the patent holder of the technology. Based on the decision, a lower court ruled in favor of the Korean this time.

pss@koreatimes.co.kr