Microsoft ordered to halt Win XP sales in China
IP champion accused of IP theft
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Microsoft has been ordered to stop selling Windows XP in China after a court ruled that certain fonts in the operating system infringe on a Chinese firm's intellectual property.
On Monday, Beijing's 1st Intermediate People's Court decided that Microsoft had overstepped a deal with Zhongyi Electronics to include the company's Chinese fonts in Windows 95 by also slipping them into eight other versions of Windows without permission. The alleged font-pas includes Windows 95, 98, 2000, and XP — but not more recent releases: Vista and Windows 7.
The court has ordered Microsoft and its China-based ops to immediately stop producing and selling the infringing operating systems, according to the English-language version of state television broadcaster, CCTV.
When asked for comment, Microsoft said via prepared written statement that it will appeal the decision and believes its license agreement with Zhongyi covered in full their use of the technology.
According to the company, the ruling will not go into effect until it is affirmed by an appeals court.
The Bejing court rejected additional claims from Zhongyi that Microsoft was equally neglectful in paying licensing fees for its flagship "Zhemga" product, which allows users to enter Chinese characters using Western keyboards.
Microsoft having been declared guilty of IP theft in China is of course rather cutting, as the company spends much of its time in the country championing its own intellectual property. This August, Microsoft boasted that a Chinese court jailed two men for three and a half years and two accomplices for two years for distributing a bootleg copy of Windows XP. In fact, the company quite regularly announces Chinese IP piracy busts.
Not this one, though. Strange. ®
COMMENTS
@captain kangaroo
Who is complaining, China, or the Chinese Firm...
Microsoft's boasting
"This August, Microsoft boasted that a Chinese court jailed two men for three and a half years and two accomplices for two years for distributing a bootleg copy of Windows XP."
Getting someone thrown into a Chinese prison for three and a half years for something with regard to proprietary software should not attract more than a fine is not something I'd boast about.
Irony - *verb* like steely but made of iron..
I think some people only see one half of what makes this ironic. The pot, kettle, black nature of the accusation, the fact Windows XP and probably most of Microsoft's software library is sold on the street with impunity for about $1 for the lot is only one part.
The true irony is that it took a nation like China to prosecute Microsoft for what most of us have suspected them of doing to countless companies over the last 3 decades.
Windows itself remains below suspicion of course, but no one really cares about that. If anyone truly cared that, amongst others, the Mac OS was.. erm.. inspirational to the design of Windows, then Microsoft would have been successfully shut down 30 years ago. It's the small businesses that created software like Partition Magic that we felt for.
So I consider it the definition of irony that it took the legal system of a country that ignores piracy to take down Microsoft for piracy.
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