On evening of May 7, Foxit Software announced that it had received a civil judgment from the Fuzhou Intermediate People’s Court, ruling on the first instance of the lawsuit between the company and Kingsoft Office for infringement of computer software copyright.

According to the announcement, Kingsoft Office and Zhuhai Kingsoft Office Software Co., Ltd. were ordered to stop the infringement, apologize, and compensate Foxit Software for economic losses and reasonable expenses incurred to stop the infringement, totaling 10 million yuan ($1.56 million).

The dispute between the two parties originated a few years ago. According to Foxit Software’s announcement in January 2022, the company found at the end of 2019 that 35 Kingsoft PowerWord software products released on Kingsoft Office’s official website, Kingsoft PowerWord’s official website and third-party download sites used Foxit Software’s PDF technology to implement the “export PDF document format” function of Kingsoft PowerWord.

Foxit Software believed that Kingsoft Office’s act violated the company’s computer software copyright and filed a lawsuit requesting that Kingsoft Office be ordered to compensate for losses of 35 million yuan ($5.5 million) and pay related expenses.

The judgment also stated that Kingsoft Office and Zhuhai Kingsoft must stop using software copies that infringe on the “Foxit PDF Generator Software [abbreviated as: Foxit PDF Generator] V1.0” software copyright in the “Kingsoft PowerWord” software and stop publishing infringing “Kingsoft PowerWord” software on the Internet platform. As a leading company in the field of domestic office software, Kingsoft Office and Foxit Software had cooperated in the early years. According to the data, in November 2011, Foxit Software signed a “Software Cooperation Development Technology Agreement” with Zhuhai Kingsoft, with the project name of “OFFICE Document Format Conversion to PDF Document Format”. But in recent years, the two sides have had a lot of disputes over the development and use of PDF technology, and have repeatedly triggered lawsuits.

In May 2016, Foxit Software sued Kingsoft Office for breach of contract on the grounds that Kingsoft Office used the “OFFICE Document Format Conversion to PDF Document Format” technology stipulated in the 2011 agreement in its WPS office software, and claimed 100 million yuan ($15.6 million).

In April 2020, Beijing Intellectual Property Court ruled that the “Software Cooperation Development Technology Agreement” signed by the two parties in November 2011 was terminated on November 18, 2014, and Zhuhai Kingsoft compensated for losses of 300,000 yuan ($47,000) (the final judgment was changed to compensate Foxit Software for 1.5 million yuan ($234,000)). In addition, in November 2018, Foxit Software also filed a lawsuit on the grounds that Kingsoft Office used Foxit Software’s PDF technology in four versions of WPS office software, infringing on the company’s computer software copyright.