Monday, February 07, 2005

Fallout From Japanese Patent On Help Icon

Posted by timothy on Monday February 07, @07:39AM
from the interesting-times dept.
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.


Linky

As noted in some of the slash dot posts they are not suing Microsoft which also has a help button.

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