Spain's Supreme Court said the professor will have to hand the student €5,000 after he plagiarized her doctoral work.

The court found that the professor from the University of Murcia — known only as Francisco A.E. for legal reasons — had copied content from a doctoral thesis he originally supervised.   

The judgement came after the professor at the University of Murcia appealed an earlier decision in Valencia's provincial court, reported ABC newspaper on Monday.

The money is compensation for the violation of intellectual property rights said Supreme Court judge Ignacio Sancho in his sentence.

The doctorate in question, by María Isabel G., and titled 'Civil responsibility derived from the issue prospectus of negotiable securites', was submitted in 1998.

She received top marks and the work went on to be published in 2001.

Then, six years later, Francisco A.E published an article with similar subject material.

The professor's ex-student claimed, though, that the article duplicated some of her own work.

But the professor defended himself by saying he had actually drawn up the article before María Isabel handed in her doctoral work in 1998.

The professor presented the court with an annotated document which he said proved he had written the work first and then passed this to his student for her information.

The judges, however, upheld the version of the student who claimed she had written the text and then passed it on to her doctoral supervisor for corrections.

In his sentence, Judge Ignacio Sancho also said news of the professor's plagiarism would be published in a national newspaper "without commentary or footnotes".