Wordprocessor maker wins appeal against Matsushita

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3rd October 2005 --- The Ichitaro wordprocessing software seems to be safe from a patent attack by Japanese Electronics giant Matsushita. Five judges of a newly installed Tokyo High Intellectual Property Court found that Matsushita's patent on the help drag-and-drop function represented no significant advance over the known art of the early 1990s when it was filed. In February of this year a lower court had ordered the removal of the Ichitaro software from the market and destruction of all stocked disks containing this software, but had stopped short of issuing a preliminary execution warrant. Thus Ichitaro maker Justsystem K.K., a main competitor of Microsoft on the wordprocessor market in Japan, seems to be out of harmsway.

Sources

• ja.wikinews.org report

More details

Justsystem introduced new prior art into the proceding, pointing in particular to a system from Hewlett Packard which already contained a drag and drop help button function in the early nineties when the patent was filed.

Justsystem was condemned to withdraw and destroy its products by Tokyo district court in February 2005.

The new "Tokyo Higher Intellectual Property Court" was installed this year and the Justsystem appeal against Matsushita was its first case.

Justsystem is a company of 900 employees.

Matsushita, also known under labels like National Panasonic, is for Japan what GE is for the USA and Siemens for Germany. Matsushita probably owns more European software patents than both Siemens and GE. At least they were at the very top of the list of EPO software patents applicants for several years. The patent under litigation here was however applied for and granted in Japan only.

Comments

Hartmut Pilch

The speed and ease with which the court decided that Justsystems was not infringing a valid patent claim is quite impressive. At least in Germany an infringment court would assume the patent to be valid until disproven by an invalidation procedure in a separate court. In some other European countries the procedure would be less patentee-friendly than in Germany, but usually it would take several years. Yet the damage suffered by Justsystem in terms of lost time, court fees and legal incertainty is still considerable. Thousands of other software patents are waiting out there to be used, and many of their claims are less easy to disprove on grounds of prior art than those of Matsushita help button patent. Also, most potential victims are far less able to shoulder the burdens than Justsystem.