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Microsoft Patents Interactive Entertainment

Posted by timothy on from the getcher-patents-get-'em-while-they're-hot dept.

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."

2 of 466 comments (clear)

  1. Submitted story is incorrect by gwernol · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. OK, this is getting rediculous... by Doobian+Coedifier · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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