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Microsoft Loses South Korea Patent Ruling

Posted by Zonk on from the shouldn't-a-company-with-that-much-money-be-smarter dept.

mikesd81 writes "Ars Technica is carrying an article discussing Microsoft's denial for an appeal in a South Korean patent infringement case. The case focused on the automatic translation between English and Korean in Microsoft Office and was brought against the company in 2000. The Supreme Court of South Korea ruled that the patents are effective for technologies switching the input mode between Korean and English." From the article: "Technology firm P&IB, which sued Microsoft on behalf of Professor Lee, wants Microsoft to ante up to the tune of W70 billion ($75 million) in a separate lawsuit covering damages. 'Microsoft adapted our technologies to its Office package without dealing with Prof. Lee and it claimed the patents were not effective in the court,' P&IB President Kim Kil-hae told The Korea Times."

2 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Re:busted! from TFA, maybe can't sell office by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 2, Informative
    Just because they have the majority of the market share and because you personally don't like the company doesn't make Microsoft a monopoly.

    IIRC, it does for the purposes of U.S. antitrust law. If I remember correctly from the Slashdot discussions from 1999, you're legally a monopoly if you have a significant influence over prices in the market.

    Are you suggesting that Microsoft doesn't substantially influence the pricing of office software?

    --
    http://outcampaign.org/
  2. The technology in question may be.... by ihavnoid · · Score: 2, Informative

    Though I read the article, I could no find any details on the patent. However, the tone of the article seems it is referring to 'automatic input mode switching' method.

    Very often, people type Korean while the input mode is in English, and vice versa. What the software does, is that it detects the context of the typing sequence, and figure out whether it needs automatic mode change or not. For example, detecting invalid Korean is simple -- the software simply seeks for invalid typing sequences, since each Korean syllable contains of a sequence of consonant - vowel - consonant (while the last consonant is optional).
    Detecting invalid English sequences will be a little bit more difficult, but it seems to be possible using clever techniques combined with large dictionaries.

    If the detection algorithm is crappy, typing becomes a nightmare, since it transforms correct English into incorrect Korean typing (or vice versa). However, in these cases, the 'auto-mode-change' can be turned off, or custom words can be added into the dictionary. The two most popular word processing softwares (MS Word and Hangul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_(word_processo r)) both has a good implementation.

    The wierd thing is that I could not find any source of this news on most major Korean sites.