Microsoft Wokked In China

Something not reported in the usual places, this week Microsoft lost a suit in China over the fonts used in Chinese copies of Windows from Windows 98 to present.

Coming right at the launch of Windows 7 this has to really hurt early adoption there.

The news of this comes by way of the ITWire, which tells us the rest of the story -

Microsoft was successfully sued for copyright infringement by the developer of the Chinese fonts used in almost all versions of Windows.

In a judgement handed down by Beijing’s No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court earlier this week, Microsoft has been banned from selling all versions of Windows from Windows 98 onwards in China.

In a statement on their website, Zhongyi Electronic said that the agreement signed with Microsoft permitted the use of their Chinese character fonts in Windows 95 only; Microsoft clearly disagreed with that.

Microsoft immediately announced they would appeal the ruling.  “Microsoft respects intellectual property rights,” the company said in a statement.  “We use third party IPs only when we have a legitimate right to do so.”

We have yet to see whether this ruling will affect the small but significant number of sales of Chinese Windows versions in other parts of the world.

Perhaps this Microsoft spokesperson was hoping they had not heard of the little problem with the Windows 7 flash drive tool.

“By winning this case against an internationally well-known company like Microsoft, it shows that China, although still a developing country, is taking positive steps to protect intellectual property rights,” Zhongyi’s lawyer Ling Xinyu told Reuters.

Actually, I think it shows that the Chinese are not above taking advantage of the streak of lawsuits that Microsoft has been involved in. Misery loves company.

For many years, China has been considered a copyright ‘backwater,’ where scant heed was paid to such niceties.  However, China is a signatory to the two primary international agreements of copyright – The Berne Convention and also The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (which guarantees copyright holders exclusive control over their works for their lifetime plus 50 years).  As a signatory, China has begun to take a much stronger and internationally accorded stance on the issue.

Like Taiwan, China has moved from a defensive position where domiciled organisations were the recipients of such legal actions to a more proactive posture where they are the clear owners of intellectual property and are prepared to defend those holdings.

The case was first filed in April 2007 and represents a very significant impact upon Microsoft’s activities in China.

Zhongyi is still studying the ruling and has yet to decide whether to pursue monetary compensation from Microsoft, spokesman Lan Fei told Agence France-Presse.

Though Microsoft will not do it, I would like to see the Chinese operate without Windows – legal Windows that is, when trying to interact with the rest of the world. Removing any way for China to have a legal copy of Windows using Chinese script, along with vigorous enforcement of antipiracy  laws would certainly improve the trade balance in a hurry.

Red Star Linux indeed.

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There are three reasons why lawyers are replacing rats as laboratory research animals. One is that they are plentiful, another is that lab assistants don’t get so attached to them and the third is that they will do things that you just can’t get rats to do. Blanche Knott

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