Chinese Court Rules Microsoft Violated IP Rights

angry tapir writes "A Beijing court has ruled that Microsoft violated a Chinese company's intellectual property rights in a case over fonts used in past Windows operating systems. The Beijing Number One Intermediate People's Court ordered Microsoft to stop selling versions of Windows that use the Chinese fonts, including Windows XP. Microsoft plans to appeal the case. Microsoft originally licensed Zhongyi's intellectual property more than a decade ago for use in the Chinese version of Windows 95, according to Zhongyi. Zhongyi argues that agreement applied only to Windows 95, but that Microsoft continued to use the intellectual property in eight versions of Windows from Windows 98 to Windows XP. Vista and Windows 7 are not involved."

Re:Stop selling to China

[Haxzaw]

Woosh

Re:A bit late?

[gyrogeerloose]

If the fonts are so indistinguishable should they even be copyrighted?

In the United States, you can't copyright a font, at least, not exactly. You can copyright the name and code you used to create a font but you have no legal recourse if someone buys a copy of your font, prints it out, traces it exactly, creates an identical font and sells it under a different name. That's why you can find so many versions of what looks like the same font, often with similar names. Geneva and Helvetica (Helvetica being a name sometimes applied to Switzerland) comes immediately to mind. Futura and Avant Garde are the same, even if the names are not so obviously similar.

How are you people so TOTALLY wrong

[ifwm]

At least for us Americans IP is the only thing we still produce.

Nope, you couldn't possibly be more wrong if you tried.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#Manufacturing [wikipedia.org]

"USA is the leading manufacturer in the world with a 2007 industrial output of US$2,696,880 millions. Main industries are petroleum, steel, motor vehicles, aerospace, telecommunications, chemicals, electronics, food processing, consumer goods, lumber, mining."

Please educate yourself, so you're not making claims like "At least for us Americans IP is the only thing we still produce DESPITE HAVING THE LARGEST MANUFACTURING OUTPUT OF ANY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD".

Although is it fun to repeatedly inform you people who like to pretend you know what you're talking about that you do not, in fact, have ANY idea WTF you are talking about and have just proven so.

Re:It fascinates me...

[englishknnigits]

Very clever, using a strawman fallacy to disprove something by wrongly claiming the other argument is a strawman. He made the obvious point that China ignores other countries IP but now seems to care about its own. That would be comparable to the US having horrible fiscal responsibility and then caring about other countries fiscal responsibility. They are the same in that they are both hypocritical, get it?

Re:A bit late?

[portalcake625]

I think you meant Arial and Helvetica (Although side by side, they are way different fonts)