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.

Comments

as if more proof were needed

[ChipMonk]

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.

Re:as if more proof were needed

[stephenisu]

Were the infringing features added before 1998?

Re:It's not the thing, it's the method

[oliverthered]

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.

Re:It's not the thing, it's the method

[Brandybuck]

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.

Patents must be published

[brunos]

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.

Re:Patents must be published

[JohnFluxx]

It's very dangerous to read patents because while infringing on a patent is bad, infringing on a patent knowingly is double as bad (literally - I seem to remember double damages?). If it can be shown that you even glanced at the patent, whether you thought it applied or not, you are in trouble.

Re:Patents must be published

[QuantumG]

for fuck sake, it's Johnny Mnemonic.

MacOS 7 as prior art?

[jeti]

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.

Ichitaro and JustSystem

[davejenkins]

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...

Re:Ichitaro and JustSystem

[nagora]

is really is a minimal event for the overall market

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:Ichitaro and JustSystem

[Simon Brooke]

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.

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.

Re:Now if only someone had patented "Clippy"

[Maestro4k]

If only someone would sue Microsoft for Clippy, we could finally be rid of the biggest annoyance in Microsoft Office.

• Personally I think the biggest annoyance by far in Microsoft Office is it's inability to open older versions of it's own .doc format properly, and the fact that Microsoft seems to make sure the current version of the .doc format won't work in older versions nearly every release. Meanwhile you have Wordperfect's .wpd format that hasn't changed since version 6 and works just fine.

• 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

[Maestro4k]

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.

• So ultimately software patents screw over the public no matter what. While Matsushita may be in the right here, software patents are what created the mess and the public still loses. Just even more proof that software patents are bad ideas.

Re:Now if only someone had patented "Clippy"

[Maestro4k]

The biggest anoyance is that it's not using a standard format for those files. If it were, not only would you have compatability within the product family; but with other families (Adobe, F/OSS, etc) as well.

• That's the ideal yes, but at a minimum it should be able to handle it's own proprietary format proprely, something MS Word fails to do. Even if it tried to use open formats, it'd probably screw them up so badly it couldn't open them up properly itself, much less anything else handle them.

• 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.

May as well face it, this is the future

[serutan]

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.

Re:It's not the thing, it's the method

[flyingsquid]

Does anyone else smell the hand of Bill Gates, or is it just me?

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...

One missing fact... ok a few

[Foo2rama]

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.

Re:It's not the thing, it's the method

[Simon Brooke]

This is not a problem with the patent system.

This is a problem with the patent system, for two reasons:

1. A patent should not be granted unless the idea being patented is not obvious. Having a standardised icon to invoke help is obvious.
2. A patent should not be granted unless the idea being patented is novel. I don't know when the alleged Matsushita patent was granted, but I was using an icon (a bitmap representation of a question mark, but hey - it may not be pretty but it's an icon) in 1986, and I know I wasn't the first - I'm pretty sure the Xerox STAR office software had a similar system, because that's where I think I filched it from.

It's a shame

[RoLi]

3 news stories and none of them explains what the patent really is about.

Does anybody know?

Re:It's not the thing, it's the method

[Viceice]

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?

Re:It's not the thing, it's the method

[k96822]

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.