According to Symantec, Microsoft had licensed technology associated with Veritas' Volume Manager product in 1996 and was using it beyond the scope of the contract.

Symantec said it has tried to negotiate with Microsoft for a year and filed the lawsuit after those talks failed to settle the problem.

"Over the course of nearly a decade, Microsoft has deliberately and surreptitiously misappropriated Symantec's valuable data storage technologies, misled and thereby convinced the United States government to issue patents to Microsoft based on technologies invented by Symantec," the complaint states.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle and seeks unspecified damages and an injunction barring Microsoft from using Symantec technology in Microsoft's Vista and Longhorn versions of the Windows client and server operating systems, according to the complaint.

In a statement, Microsoft said that it had not overstepped the boundaries of its agreement to use Veritas' IP and that "these claims will be shown to be without merit."