Japanese software patents kill Word competitor

I can't summarize this any better than this Slashdot poster: "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."
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