Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Patents Interactive Entertainment
An anonymous reader writes "Embedded-Watch is carrying a story regarding the award of patent number 6,571,390 to Microsoft. The patent would seem to cover pretty much any implementation of a video-on-demand system that you (or at least I) can think of. Read for yourself to decide whether this patent either is not original work or is blatantly obvious to the most casual observer. The patent could certainly be invalidated by the courts on either point, but that'd take a fight in court that won't be cheap."
This isn't just going to affect the big boys. There are companies that make various kinds of useful video-delivery, conferencing, and broadcast software that do the exact same things. Not a big market, but a market nonetheless.
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This patent covers what they're doing too. I've seen at least two hardware/software suites designed to create similar functionality on a smaller scale.
If Microsoft gets aggressive, I wonder who they'll go after first .
As to the patent, I'd say I'm surprised . . . but I'm not surprised.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
The adult entertainment industry has been doing this for years. Surely all manner of pr0n video-on-demand services must fall under this (rather large) umbrella. It seems to me that pr0n led the way in this department, and that Larry Flynt should make Bill Gates star in one of his films if he wants to keep this patent.
On a related note, I wonder what Bill's name would be if he appeared in one of Flynt's works?
... or anything that sounds like windows *cough* Lindows *cough*
More than likely this patent was awarded for the rate selecting feature, as that seems to be the novelty in the patented claims. Hopefully the scope will not go beyond that either...
Simple really, think of a way that MS or another company can screw you. Than all you need to do is get this patented. Once patented the EFF should have a fund to reimburse people for the cost of the patent. At which point the patent should be placed into an EFF trust dedicated to making sure that particular bad idea can't be used. Come on people, let's use their system against them instead of getting it used against us again. For not that much money we could head off a lot of DRM and other such madness before it does it's damage.
If MS were to use this patent against other companies, how easy would it be for the companies to overturn/invalidate the patent? Would it take lots of money for a big legal team or could you just have one good(but not exceptional) lawyer? And if it takes a big legal team, then why on earth does it take a bunch of lawyers and a bunch of money to uphold the law? Something is wrong with this country if you need to spend money to uphold the law.
Cases like this make me wish people who file for obviously invalid patents were held responsible for the costs of litigation to throw their patent out (watch out for the borderline cases that honestly believed their application was valid, though). Of course, we wouldn't have this problem if the patent office didn't grant them in the first place.
If this patent really does cover any and all media on demand stuff, it'll get shot down quick. Not because our legal system is somehow honest, but because there are powerful interests that won't want to pay Microsoft licensing fees. i.e. the momment MS tries to demand cash from AOL/Time Warner this'll be slapped down.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
From what we've all learned is that microsoft collects patents and typically doesn't use them to force themselves onto other corporations like a frat boy at a sweet sixteen party.
The thing is, if microsoft suddenly finds its share price dropping or people quit the windows habit cold-turkey, we're all in for something that looks kinda like the end of Akira.
Just my $0.02
From the article
"Upon expiration of the rental period, however, the program is no longer readily accessible until ordered again."
This is pay-per-view for Windows Media Player and cie. This is "blatantly obvious" because it talks about customizable SCROLL BARS. Quit bashing the patent case, it's not for what you think. It doesn't englobe EVERYTHING. You'll still be able to enjoy pay per view porn. As long as it doesn't have any scroll bars and any order, LOL have you read that?
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
Free cell phone tracking
I just read the patent and although I am not a patent lawyer, I have written patent applications and hold two so I know something about reading them.
This patent does not cover video on demand systems. Read the claims of the patent, which describe the novel features covered. These boil down to:
A user interface widget that allows you to see a list of available items, where the UI widget is scrollable and the user can control the scroll rate via a preference and the widget shows videos available on a back-end VOD system.
This is so far from a "patent [that] would seem to cover pretty much any implementation of a video-on-demand system" that its laughable. It covers a very specific feature that is used in a proscribed and specific way. Most VOD system's probably don't have this UI and even if they did it would be easy to work around it.
The short story: don't over-react, this is not a patent on VODs.
Sailing over the event horizon
Posters: READ THE GODDAMN ARTICLE! You look like an idiot is you reply based on just the summary. It's pretty ovious a good number of posters haven't read it.
Editors: Stop posting stories with misleading summaries! It confuses the Slashdot community, who likes to post their knee-jerk reactions.
I'm gonna lose my karma for this, so be it. Slashdot sucks more and more every day, with duplicates, misleading summaries, and Ask Slashdots that could be solved by Googling, eopinions.com (Color laser printer), or reading your manual ("broken" V-chip is actually CC text mode). Check out "Not Slashdot", kuro5hin.org
If a company submits a patent that is too broad as in this case there is clearly a large body of previous work that supercedes this patent. In this case the company should be refused the patent. They then reword the patent until the Patent office lets it through.
How do we change the current patent system to remove this incentive? The brute force method would be to strengthen the patent granting process to ensure that no such patents are accepted but the cost of this solution falls soley on the patent office. Do we punish companies when patents are rejected with fines to fund the patent office?
Bitch-slappin', 12 sandwich-eatin', high-priced laywers paid for by larger and larger companies make deals to keep the kids out of the sandbox.
Why would you change if you were the patent office? You get your money, the companies battle it out, the lawyers are red-eyed with hookers and blow - everybody wins!
Oh, except for that pesky citezenry.
There's a reason for patents.
If this patent was rejected, would it have stopped MS from developing and rolling this out and collecting profits from it? Would it have given competition unfair market share away from MS? Does the award of the patent justify return on investment for developing this new invention?
Who the FUCK are these people in the patent office? I'm a noob when it comes to law and patents, and I don't know much about VOD, but even I can tell you to chuck this out. Can someone with some clout or maybe who has a friend in the news industry or technews (online or paper) please convince a reporter to go visit the patent office and find out what they are doing? It doesn't appear to be that the people with decision making roles in vital positions, whether they are in the seat of power or not (it may just be a paper-pushin dweeb like me) has any moral, ethical or mental capacity to defer judgement of this sort of thing. Either that or he knows nothing about technology (and he works in the patent office?). I'd like his name, face, address and phone number plastered all over slashdot so we can harass him from time to time. People must be accountable for their actions or we continue this path. It doesn't take alot of imagination or visionary forsight to see where it leads.
"What are you doing."
"I'm processing a patent for..."
"What are you doing."
"Well I was telli..."
"What are you doing."
"Wa... I..."
"What are you doing."
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Smack!
"Ow... that hur..."
Please see previous article: Auction Patent
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
I'm sorry, this discussion board is specifically for people who have never read a patent filing. ;)
I've said it a hundred times on here, you can't patent an idea, only the specific implementation of an idea.
You're right, in that that's the general idea of the patent system - but specific incidents have proven this to be no longer necessarily the case. The most oft-cited and egregious example is the one-click patent. If ever there was a patent on an idea, it's that one. If I were Ford, I'd go patent an engine with more than 40 MPG, because it's the same thing: efficiency of use. And that isn't an implementation.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Windows was a common word used to describe a graphical user interface that had...well..windows. X-Windows, Mac, MSFT Windows all utilize windows. It's a generic term. On the other hand, Sun (I'm assuming you are refering to the same people that made Java) did not use a generic name in regards to the company. Unix didn't already run a version of Sunlight, Daylight, or Firey Star. There was nothing already to confuse it to. Two organizations can have very similar trademark as long as their respective uses do not overlap and it would be obvious to anyone (Patent/TM office excluded) that they are different products. Examples being Lexus (car) & Lexis (Law database), Apple (Computers) and Apple (Records) and Apple (Employment).
So, if I correctly translate this from LBS (Legalese BullS***), it reads:
"You choose items you want from one scrolling list, add them to your playlist, then save it. Then call in and rent something from the playlist." Ok, that definetly counts as "Blatantly obvious to any observer."
In other news today, M$ has filed for [strike that, recieved] a patent for "A means by which heat and pressure are used to compress protium nuclei and accelerate them to the necessary speeds to join into one nucleus, releasing energy in the process." [LBS translation: "Fusion"] Several hours later, Microsoft sued several phototrophic life forms for violating it's patent, and is reportedly considering lawsuits against the Orion Nebula, the Sun, and the Milky Way Galaxy.
Does it disturb anyone else that we're talking about patent number 6,570,390 when 6,000,000 was awarded for HotSync just a couple of years ago?
And I though the tech economy had collapsed? Perhaps now that they can't make money on real products, they have to make money on royalties.
-twb
I can then go into detail as to how it would work from the users' perspective, again without being able to spell it out in sufficient detail for a patent application.
The situation is analogous to people coming up to you and saying they have a great idea for a game/application/website/whatever, and that, if you develop it for them for free, they'll give you a (small) cut. Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you've been in the coding biz for any length of time, you've learned how to tell these leaches to fuck off.
Ideas aren't patentable. Implementations are. Or at least ideas sufficiently fleshed out so that they could be implemented, if one had the requisite technology.
Read a patent. While it tries to be as vague as possible in many areas, so as not to exclude any overlooked applications, it also contains enough specificity to allow someone to identify what is being patented.
Yes, it's confusing, but then again, the USPTO is a pretty confused place to begin with :-)
Yeah, you're in what's known as a test market. It's small and insignificant so they can use you to test their betas. Just one way the cable industry is different from microsoft...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...patent, that is. If MS didn't patent this, AOL/TW or some other company might have. If MS patents it, everybody accuses them of being part of the patent problem.
The companies aren't the problem. The system is the problem. The patent system is set up to encourage an escalation of silly patents. Patents are the weapons, the patent office is the arms merchant, and small companies are buffer states between superpowers. Until that changes, MS, SBC, AOL/TW, IBM, and every other corporation on the planet will be filing silly patents to get ahead of their enemies who might file the same silly patent.
There are plenty of reasons to point fingers at MS, this isn't one of them.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The author of the article seems to base his analyis of the patent primarily on what is written in the abstract. This is meaningless. What matters primarily in any patent is the claims. The description and figures can be used to indicate intent in some cases, but this is very much secondary to the text of the claims.
Strongly suggest that, before forming any opinions, you read the patent itself (follow the link in the main posting). Pay particular attention to the claims, and bear in mind that, in order for a device to infringe the patent, it must do *all* of the things listed in any given claim. Doing only some of the things doesn't count.
Probably because filing a patent isn't free. I don't recall offhand what the fees are, but considering how many defensive patents would have to be filed, the amount would add up fast.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
But first some general notes about the patent.
This patent has a tortured prosecution history as the related cases suggest:
This is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/179,545, filed Oct. 26, 1998, which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/437,096, filed May 5, 1995, which is now U.S. Pat. No. 5,861,906.
Without the prosection history, one can only speculate as to why this is the case, but commonly there is a procedure in the USPTO known as a "file wrapper continuation" where the applicant can continue prosecution of a twice rejected application by simply paying a new filing fee and filing the application all over again. An assumption would be that this is what has happened since there are 40+ US patent prior art references and NO non US patent prior art references. Since US examiners are prone to cite US patents as prior art, I assume that all of the prior art references were dug up by the USPTO.
A reasonable conclusion is that the USPTO worked damn hard to kill this application, or at least reduce the scope of the claims. Hats off to examiners Andrew Faile and Jasom Salce at the USPTO for giving it their best effort.
Let's see what the zealous lawyers at Lee & Hayes PLLC were able to get for their client.
The patent contains only three independent claims (hmmm, MS probably paid at least $25,000 to get this patent and the zealous lawyers at Lee & Hayes didn't even bother to add some dependent claims. tsk, tsk, tsk.)
Three claims: an apparatus, a method, and a method used in an apparatus.
Looks like claim 2 is the broadest one....
2. A method for operating a user interface used in interactive entertainment network system, the interactive entertainment network system having a content provider which is connected to provide video content programs to a plurality of user interface units in individual homes, the user interface being executed on a processor provided at each user interface unit, the method comprising the following steps:
hmmmm nothing new or interesting in the preamble
generating a list of entries pertaining to the video content programs;
displaying a number of entries on the list; nothing much clever about this element.
scrolling through the list by continually updating the displayed entries, whereby one entry on the list is removed as another entry on the list is added; and
sort of maybe a little novel - deleting one entry as another is added...
enabling a viewer to adjust a rate at which entries are removed and added to thereby modify a rate at which the list visually appears to be scrolling.
sort of maybe even a little bit more novel - adjusting the rate so that it appears to be scrolling...
my guess: probably a valid patent - a narrow, useless, easy to design around patent. but probably a valid patent nonetheless.
it certainly is NOT as the title suggests a patent "covering" VOD - "distantly related to" VOD, perhaps, "covering a minor, unimportant, and irrlelevant feature of" VOD is more accurate.
looks like the USPTO did a good job on this one.
so do as sql*kitten says and "read the claims!"
and please - lay off the examiners and the USPTO and read the bloody claims and try to make a reasonable conclusion about what the patent covers before spouting off with animal food trough water, empty headed wipers of other people's backsides slashdot reactions about patents.
bottom line is that this is a narrow, unimportant, easily avoided, easily designed around patent which adds very little value to MS's portfolio and should give no one cause for concern - except's MS's legal department who paid alot of money for it.
happy now?
Using "prior art" to overturn a patent isn't as easy as you think. If you go to court, and the other guy has a patent and you don't, then you have to prove that his patent is invalid. All the patent holder has to do is wave a piece of paper in front of the judge. By default, the patent holder has the patent. The "prior art" claimant has to change the status of the situation.
In other words, you are blaming MS for not putting the burden of proof on itself.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?