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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."
... from the people who wanted exclusive rights for the common word "windows"
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http://www.hellection.com
Two words:
"Prior Art".
I had "Video on Demand" working on my C64 sometime circa 1983 in conjunction with a couple of VCRs.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
So they patented a directory of videos in thumbnail view?
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.
.
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
i'm pretty sure both RealPlayer and Apples QT in online mode would fit the description of the 'available programs list'..
And they where both doing it looong befor MS started trying.. the software patents are becoming more and more ridiculous.. cant somebody with som time and money to spend just sue MS for 'deliberately sabotaging market' or something ?
Someone patent the Blue Screen of Death. Then you can cross license with Microsoft!
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?
I fully expect that MS will be sued for infringing on Amazon's patent on patenting obvious things with tons of prior art.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
... both of them.
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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.
I'm sure AOL will happily buy Tivo and sue MS for any sort of award a la the Netscape vs. IE award.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
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/
the patentable feature in this patent is not VOD. check out class 725/87 for a number of VOD systems.
Read claim 1, the patentable feature is dealing with scroll rates and adding/removingfor a number of listings in a VOD environment. This is not a patent for VOD itself there are several hundred existing patents for that.
VOD by the way is streaming to a user on demmand imediatly after a program is selected, this is not a patent for just that function rather it builds on it to deal with entries/scrolling.
Actually, my English book (circa 1997) contains an essay written by Bill Gates, about just this. He talks about how asynchronous exchange of information is better and more convenient than synchronous exchange. He talks about how the telephone has made us be able to talk when we're not in the same room. The E-mail allows us to talk when we're not in the same room, or at the same time. The main point of the essay was about Video on Demand, and how it would revolutionize the way we watch movies.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
The popular geek-news site Slashdot has applied for a patent on alarmist patent stories. One anonymous editor was quoted as saying: "What can we say -- overstating the scope of a patent makes for good news -- it keeps the nerds coming back!"
"The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program." - Niven
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
The patent isn't for Video on demand, in fact they stipulate the fact that vide on demand is common. The patent is for their system of categorizing and selecting items. I know it's fun to bash MS off the cuff, but cmon...
Free cell phone tracking
Here are the claims to the patent:
This patent is and interface patent on an interface that allows you to scroll through a list of videos one item at a time. You could make a system that didn't violate it by only displaying one video item at a time in a page style instead of list style, or by displaying a multiple item list but change the entire list on a button press instead of scrolling one at a time, which is arguably more useful anyway. This patent is pretty narrow as to the type of interface it covers. Congratualtions Microsoft, you have exclusive rights to an annoying interface.
Somebody should patent exactly this, but add a claim for a "page down" feature. Microsoft will be forced to cross license that patent in order to implement this one in a user-pleasing fashion.
Hell, I was ordering porn^H^H^H^H"art films" in motels back in the 80's....
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
This is just stupid, and WILL be challenged by the other 500 pound gorilla in this space.
I'm pretty certain that any NDA i signed expired, and much of this is publically known anyway...
I worked at Time Inc. New Media in 1995. At the time, Time Warner had a fully functional video on demand system rolled out to a few neighborhoods in Orlando, Fl. It was both a source of pride and joy, but also seen as largely unworkable given the economics of the day.
It had features that included random access video, over fiber, distributed from a head-end, an electronic program guide, I believe, that showed either image or video previews, a remote control, pausing, ff/rw, the whole shebang.
The thing was run by an army of centrally located SGI Onyx servers, and the set top box was an SGI workstation, with a lot of stuff stripped out. It even included video games on demand, downloaded to an included Atari Jaguar. It had its own remote control design optimized for VOD. I think that they recycled the design for TW's current on-demand service; I'm guessing that a lot of Orlando tech and know-how is in there, too.
It should be mentioned that it featured an interface that was totally based on 3D imagery, and would appear advanced today. 8 years ago, it was just science fiction come to life.
This was not just pie-in-sky - it was completely functional. It just wasn't economically scaleable given the computational and compression limitations of the tme. Which is why I think that they mothballed it - to wait for cheaper servers, cheaper storage, cheaper bandwidth, better compression. And $200 set top boxes to display the video and interface.
Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Time-Warner, but they did, at least in the 90's, do some innovation.
Now, INAPE (not a patent examiner), but I'd say that Orlando pretty much invalidates this patent, from the EPG to the actual video-on-demand aspects. More importantly, the prior art has a muscle bound organization behind it to hopefully invalidate this straight away.
Jonathan
Posters: READ THE GODDAMN ARTICLE! You look like an idiot is you reply based on just the summary. It's pretty ovious a good number of posters haven't read it.
Editors: Stop posting stories with misleading summaries! It confuses the Slashdot community, who likes to post their knee-jerk reactions.
I'm gonna lose my karma for this, so be it. Slashdot sucks more and more every day, with duplicates, misleading summaries, and Ask Slashdots that could be solved by Googling, eopinions.com (Color laser printer), or reading your manual ("broken" V-chip is actually CC text mode). Check out "Not Slashdot", kuro5hin.org
The validity of this patent is not really the issue here. Regardless of whether there is prior art the problem is that programmers cannot generally afford to fight invalid patents. M$ accomplishes its objective which is to prevent programmers from doing their jobs.
This patent is just another example of why WE NEED TO ORGANISE an OPEN SOURCE PATENT ASSOCIATION and each of us needs to throw in $100 bux or $1000 or whatever it takes to finance an organisation that can both patent and fight for us. As a member of an organzation like this we would have the right to use any patents that we hold and we _CAN_ prevent M$ and TI and IBM and everyone else from using these patents. If _our_ organisation simply picks the best ideas we come up with and patents them in very short order we'll have a rather mean shief of patents up our collective sleeves.
The entire patent is all about a user interface with selectable favorites, a user selectable scroll-rate and video previews.
That's it.
It's got absolutely NOTHING to do with XBox Live, EA's PS2 or Nintendo's games, or anything of the sort.
After all, someones once patented a XOR cursor routine (patent #4,197,590)
You may be amused, or horrified, by some of these software patent examples. It appears that Europe is not really that much better, something the Patent Horror Gallery explicates.
So Be Aware: If my karma drops below good, I may issue a patent for a system that karmafies people and then sue the hell out of OSDN ;-)
"Would it take lots of money for a big legal team or could you just have one good(but not exceptional) lawyer?"
That is precisely the problem with the US legal system. It is a distinction which the Dutch language captures rather effectively with "gelijk hebben" and "gelijk krijgen". The first means to be right. The second means others acknowledging that you are right, deservedly or not. (lit. "to obtain/be given right") "Gelijk krijgen" in a US court is the hard part...
You can have the full strength of the law on your side, but without legal clout and stamina (i.e. a well-filled war chest) you will end up face down in the dirt against a powerful opponent. If some company takes on Microsoft, MS will simply draw the battle out with every legal trick in the books that their team of lawyers can dig up, until the plaintiff runs out of money. Then they'll make you settle or they just buy your company outright to make the lawsuit go away. A settlement is a double win for Microsoft: one less opponent in this matter, and their patent stands as strongly as it did before.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Prior Art
the odometer lives!
This patent includes being able to look at Previews After Selection etc., The motels/hotels have had VOD systems which scrolled lists (but not a "scroll bar" for some 15 years. They also allow previews of selections although you could not select a subset of programs like the patent seems to call for. The patent looks like an attempt to control the on-screen setup for making VOD selections. It seems to me that that should have been "obvious to a person familiar with the industry" especially since scroll bars are already the norm for selecting nearly anything done with computers.
Didn't Apple have scroll bars before MS reverse engineered the windows interface? Have they waited too long to patent them? Has anyone yet decided to patent those scroll arrows at the end of the scroll bars?
Perhaps the use of scroll and VOD and a couple of other things make the application unique, but I don't see anything that seems to be "not obvious".
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."
"I'm just..."
Smack!
"Ow... that hur..."
Please see previous article: Auction Patent
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
Headline: Microsoft Patents Interactive Entertainment
*me sweats bullets*
Summary: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.
* me breathes sigh of relief *
For a moment, I though M$ finally had the means to patent the sexual act.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Now, correct me if you've delved deeper into the details than I.
After reading the Claims and Summary of the Invention sections, it appears that the inventions Microsoft is claiming are:
That is all.
It may seem that Microsoft is claiming world+dog in the VOD realm, but that's only because they have to describe the entire system to provide the appropriate context for their claimed inventions. This is the mistake Mr. Wolfe makes in the linked article on Embedded Watch. He seems to think everything in the detailed description is part of the claim.
This sig intentionally left blank.
actually VOD goes back to the 70s/80s
the patent is for setting a scroll rate within a vod listings application, read claim 1.
yes you found prior art on VOD, but to invalidate the patent you need art on a VOD application that lets a user set how fast listings will scroll via a personal preference option.
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).
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
For a minute there I thought you meant Weakly Interacting Massive Particle
When
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