Last week I thought it was the last blog we had to right but it wasn’t. Now the really last blog is about intellectual property.
For this last blog I found a movie on YouTube about Microsoft who is guilty of infringement.
A Chinese court has announced that Microsoft was found guilty of infringing the intellectual property rights of local company Zhongyi Electronic Limited in China.
They ruled that Microsoft Corp infringed the intellectual property rights of the Chinese company by using a certain font. The decision was made as US President Barack Obama was on a visit to China.
On April 23, 2007, Zhongyi Electronic Limited sued Microsoft for using Zhongyi's "Zheng Ma" input method in its Windows operating systems without payment for ten years.
The company is the copyright owner of the "Zheng Ma" input method and it also owns the copyrights of the bold typeface, covering about 40,000 Chinese characters. The court said Microsoft had installed and used fonts in eight operating systems beyond what Zhongyi had agreed on.
According to the court, Microsoft just has infringed the copyrights of Zhongyi's typefaces, but not the using of "Zheng Ma" input method. After this, the court asked Microsoft to stop selling products that include Zhongyi's typefaces.
However, the court ordered no compensation.
In my opinion Microsoft has to respect the intellectual property rights just like all the other companies. If the intellectual property rights are not respected there will be a lot of chaos about this subject. According to me a creator has the right to choose if they keep their idea to themselves and if they want to sell that right they are allowed to do that.
Sources: http://www.chinatechnews.com/2009/11/18/11052-microsoft-found-guilty-of-character-input-copyright-infringement-in-china
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es5xRYWPjWI
Abonneren op:
Reacties posten (Atom)
I agree with the opinion of Lisa. People must be free to choose if they keep their ideas to themselves or if they want to sell them. There are a lot of discussions about plagiarism in the musicbussiness. But in this Microsoftcase, I also believe Microsoft is guilty of plagiarism.
BeantwoordenVerwijderenI don't agree with the opinion of Lisa. You can find a thousand of fonts for free on the internet. Fonts are something that you should not try to protect. It's something that everyone should be able to use. Microsoft's also a large corporation. Microsoft can try to mention the name of Zhongyi. That can be considered as free advertisement.
BeantwoordenVerwijderen