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Fallout From Japanese Patent On Help Icon
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.
this world has gone absolutely fucking insane.
I'm seriously considering moving to the wilderness. If there's any of that left.
This is all the more reason to order the destruction of software patents.
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.
That is why this is a problem with the patent system.
More to the point, as more and more of the things in the world become patented how are we to protect the people from the patent holders.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Good to see we're still finding reasons to destroy content just like the warmer moments of various regimes throughout time. What a waste.
I hate to be the one to defend software patents, because I really despise them, but in this case, as in most others, it's the infringing company that's getting hurt, and not "the people".
p.s. Of course, the people are getting hurt indirectly, as they are thus deprived of a choice in the marketplace.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The Japanese are known for their ability to copy an idea and then "make it better", in their own unique style (e.g. the VCR, automobile, etc.). Let's hope they can break away from that paradigm when it comes to patent law. From the sound of this article though, it looks like that might give the U.S. a run for it's money in regards to IP fascism. *sigh*
You are forgetting that if you patent something, it is not a trade secret anymore. You don't need Bnemonic style memory: all you need to do is read the patent, which is your legal right. How would you otherwise know what you are not allowed to copy?
Software patents are just ridiculous.
Holy smokes! Pana and Microsoft were plotting this back 4 years ago... Oh man...
The short description of the patent sounds very much like the help system that appeared in several incarnations on MacOS.
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 of MacOS 7 with the help icon and a copyright notice.
I hate to say it, but this really is a minimal event for the overall market-- no one I know has used Ichitaro for years. MSWord is fully entrenched here, and will be for the forseeable future.
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...
davejenkins.com |
how can patent holders and companies owning "trade secret" IP be protected from information pirates?
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.
It's pretty sad when software can't even handle it's own proprietary format properly.
p.s. Of course, the people are getting hurt indirectly, as they are thus deprived of a choice in the marketplace.
Feels like when Exluna killed BMRT thanks to Pixar IP concerns. It sucked. Thousands of my man hours went to waste.
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.
if the 78% figure of the article is accurate, they are not just a competitor of Microsoft. they f*cking own them.
We'll be seeing more and more of these, as the great Land Rush of IP patents continues. Equating intangibles with property is like creating a whole new world, ready to be staked out and fenced off like the American West in the 1800s. Eventually, creating something new and innovative without a battery of lawyers or a big corporation behind you will be as quaint a notion as walking out into the wilderness and setting up a farm.
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...
When the most popular word processor can be shut down because of a help icon, it's obvious that any innovators in US and Japan will be sued into oblivion by no-longer innovative companies that wish to maintain status quo. Other countries that don't recognize software patents will write superior, cheaper programs and non-software US businesses will eventually lobby their way into buying them despite patent violations. Remember the thing about outsourcing and foreign sweatshops?
Time to sell AMZN and MSFT. They are protecting themselves to death.
What are Japanese patent laws? And what is the actual patent? No one knows either of these things. Japanese law may not have the "Non-obviousness" or "inventive step" clauses that America does. 2nd if it is an issue of an icon being used to access help a simple fine and software patch to remove the icon and change the access to help to something other then a button/icon.
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.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
This is a problem with the patent system, for two reasons:
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Does anybody know?
Thats why I strongly believe that abstract ideas and concepts should NOT be patentable.
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?
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Eventually they will go too far and the whole thing will collapse, and we will again be able to do what we want.
And as things are going, too far might not be very farther.
Companies seem to forget the crazy idea of not making their employees want to leave to keep their ideas from getting into the hands of the competition.
Given that the remaining 10% is pretty much just a reaction formation, I think you can include that as well.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
All they have to do is take out the help icon and replace it with a menuitem. I'd hardly call that "destruction" (unless they meant the destruction of inventory).
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.)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
This is a problem with the patent system, for two reasons:
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.
OTOH, that does mean that any wealthy individual could have software development as a hobby. This is rather analogous to the way writing used to be a hobby among certain of the well-to-do. And, interestingly enough, the writers concentrated on an elegant writing style (however they defined it) rather than on sales (which was considered "crass").
... well, too obvious about what he wasn't saying (i.e. sexual references).
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
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.