Fallout From Japanese Patent On Help Icon 372
MeridianOnTheLake writes "The Tokyo District Court has ordered the destruction of Ichitaro, a software product that is the only serious competitor in Japan to Microsoft Word, and has been on sale since 1985. The ruling is based on the claim of a competitor, Matsushita, that the use of a help icon to invoke a help function infinges on one of their patents. "We are a global enterprise and we are just following international practice to enforce our IP rights," Kitadeya (Matsushita) said." Here's more on the story, as covered by Bloomberg and The Japan Times.
unfuckingbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm seriously considering moving to the wilderness. If there's any of that left.
as if more proof were needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Also from TFA: Does the Japanese patent system have no concept of "prior art"? The patent in question was granted in 1998, but the products in "violation" has been on the market since 1985 and 1987.
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:2, Insightful)
That is why this is a problem with the patent system.
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:as if more proof were needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Destroyed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:5, Insightful)
p.s. Of course, the people are getting hurt indirectly, as they are thus deprived of a choice in the marketplace.
The Japanese (Score:2, Insightful)
Patents must be published (Score:4, Insightful)
Software patents are just ridiculous.
The smoking gun! (Score:1, Insightful)
MacOS 7 as prior art? (Score:5, Insightful)
AFAIK the bubble help gave context sensitive information on GUI elements after activating it with a button.
Apparently MacOS 7 came out two years before the patent was filed. Here's a screenshot [emuunlim.com] of MacOS 7 with the help icon and a copyright notice.
Ichitaro and JustSystem (Score:5, Insightful)
In regards to Open Source alternatives such as OpenOffice, they are sorley lacking in Kanji conversion, dictionaries, and layout flexibility. I know that Turbo and Others put effort into this, but progress is slow...
it has nothing to do with who worked where (Score:3, Insightful)
Patents are not trade secrets. The fact that someone moved between companies doesn't make the patent claim any more valid.
Furthermore, the ossified Japanese economy needs to encourage mobility of workers, in particular, high-tech workers. The kind of exchange of knowledge and ideas that brings is essential to a high-tech economy. Even if your argument were valid that this has to do with employees moving between companies, it would still be a bad decision from that point of view.
What makes this patent particularly vile is that it was filed in 1989 but granted in 1998; this almost certainly constitutes a deliberate abuse of the patent system by Matsushita.
Most of the "ideas" that companies generate (in particular Japanese companies) were almost entirely developed in academia anyway; it is only companies that can afford to do carpet patenting in order to snare others in their so-called IP. Let's hope that universities will be fighting back aggressively by patenting themselves; once companies face huge patent portfolios without the ability to cross license, then maybe things will change.
Re:Now if only someone had patented "Clippy" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty sad when software can't even handle it's own proprietary format properly.
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:4, Insightful)
p.s. Of course, the people are getting hurt indirectly, as they are thus deprived of a choice in the marketplace.
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:1, Insightful)
Feels like when Exluna killed BMRT thanks to Pixar IP concerns. It sucked. Thousands of my man hours went to waste.
Re:Ichitaro and JustSystem (Score:4, Insightful)
Being allowed to successfully sue over a help icon is not a minimal event. Bad judgements like these are used as precedents in later cases regardless of the importance of the initial trial. Many a bad law has been formed on the basis of a neighbour's hedge.
TWW
Re:Patents must be published (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Now if only someone had patented "Clippy" (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly I believe Open Office handles older versions of .doc formats better than the current MS Word does.
Note: I'm not just MS bashing, I use Word a lot myself, and this is a very frustrating bug to deal with. It gets old having to upgrade every time a new version comes out (gotta make sure I can read all the Word documents that come my way), and having to keep older versions around on a backup machine for when the current version opens an older version .doc and it's unreadable without a few hours of formatting.
strange definition of competitor (Score:2, Insightful)
May as well face it, this is the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:4, Insightful)
Man, Bill Gates is to Slashdotters what Satan is to the evangelicals- this all powerful, ubiquitous incarnation of darkness, whom all evil acts in the world can be blamed on.
I mean, I'm not saying I disagree with that viewpoint or anything...
Re:Patents must be published (Score:4, Insightful)
Time to call your broker (Score:3, Insightful)
Time to sell AMZN and MSFT. They are protecting themselves to death.
One missing fact... ok a few (Score:5, Insightful)
The Microsoft/Matshusita link is tenuous, what computer hardware/software company has not worked with Microsoft at some point on a collaboritive project? Sony? IBM? DELL? Compaq/HP? Using the logic that was put forth earlier anyone Apple sues could be construed as being motivated from M$...
Lets see if anyone can get some real info on this. Instead of conjucture from a few short news blurbs that contradict each other.
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a problem with the patent system, for two reasons:
Re:Ichitaro and JustSystem (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue is not Ichitaro. The issue is being able to develop software without having to look over your shoulder at the big corporations with their patent portfolios all the time. If decisions like this are allowed to stand, then small businesses cannot create software - because if anything they produce is any good, they will be sued out of existence by corporations with portfolios they can't match.
It's my view that software patents should not be allowed at all. But if they are going to be allowed the bar for non-obviousness and novelty has to be very high indeed.
It's a shame (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anybody know?
Re:Ichitaro and JustSystem (Score:2, Insightful)
For example, does ABiword allow you to set your text to be 20x20 vertical lines, running right to left, with fixed spacing? This is the sort of feature that kept Ichitaro around for a long time when it should otherwise have been dead (for all intents and purposes, it is dead now, but back in the day, there was quite a lot of infighting in government departments between the entrenched Ichitaro users and the upstart Word users).
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:4, Insightful)
Allowing a method to do something be patentable is absolutely stupid. Can you imagine if the doctor who developed organ transplant surgery patented all his findings and demanded huge royalties each time a transplant was carried out?
bah (Score:3, Insightful)
And as things are going, too far might not be very farther.
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:3, Insightful)
*destruction*? (Score:3, Insightful)
I hardly think a company would really give up a product like this, most people arn't as lazy as CmdrTaco (who took downhis JavaInvaders game rather then change the name to JInvaders or something to avoid infringing Sun's trademark.)
Re:It's not the thing, it's the method (Score:3, Insightful)
You missed the third reason, which trumps the other two:
3. A patent should not be granted unless doing so promotes the progress of science or the useful arts.
That concept is codified as supreme law in the USA, but is a good idea for all nations. It's easy to argue that patents on user interface ideas can almost never benefit progress.
After all, patents are meant as an enticement for inventors to disclose their inventions to the world, instead of hiding it in the basement using it themselves. The revenue potential from a UI enhancement that's displayed in a customer-facing product is thousands or millions of times greater than if it were kept secret. Therefore, the inventor needed no incentive to disclose the idea, so the fact that it was patentable didn't promote progress in any way.
I believe that there are whole categories of inventions, including most software and business methods, that cannot be realistically exploited without public disclosure, and which thus deserve no patent coverage.
Re:Innovation "No S/w Patents" (Score:3, Insightful)
However, since software is much more easily duplicated than manuscripts are, this would be no bar to it's wide distribution and application. And such people would find the GPL to be no obstacle to their use of it, though some of them might prefer BSD.
We live in a culture centered around businesses, but don't fall into the fallacy that all activity takes place in that context everywhere.
OTOH, it's true that the writers of Belles Lettres would generally write at a pace that makes Debian stable look rapid. But not all of them, James Branch Cabel wrote a 7 or 8 volumne series (including the noted Jurgen). Most of them are out of publication, but the writing quality is excellent. A bit staid for modern tastes, but still excellent. (Jurgen could not have been written if he was worried about publication. It was banned in much of the English speaking world for being too