Microsoft Patents 'Phone-Home' Failure Reporting

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Patents 'Phone-Home' Failure Reporting

Posted by michael on Thursday October 2, 2003 @12:26AM from the uspto-funding-based-on-number-of-patents-granted dept.

theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO awarded a patent to Microsoft for its Method and system for reporting a program failure, although a much more sophisticated version of this technology has been standard on IBM mainframes for years. Maybe prior art searches will improve once the USPTO moves into the new two million square foot USPTO campus, which includes five interconnected buildings, a twelve-story atrium, a landscaped two-acre park, and a museum."

15 of 361 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Here we go again... by Max+Romantschuk · 2003-10-02 00:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

A bit from the abstract: Method and system for reporting program failures. The system extracts information about a failure in a program module, such as the location of the failure, and establishes communication with a repository, such as a server.

Don't you just love how vague this is? It could cover almost anything, including embedded things like elevators, automated ovens and whatnot...

OK, I didn't read the whole thing, but the abstract just goes to show how little is needed these days to patent software. Argh.

--
.: Max Romantschuk :: http://max.romantschuk.fi/
1. Re:Here we go again... by stubear · 2003-10-02 00:55 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  "If all abstracts are this general how do we differentiate one patent from another in a similar field at all?"
  
  Oh, I don't know. Perhaps you RFTP and not rely on the abstract? If two seem similar you need to do further investigation of the patents themselves, not just stop at the abstract and say "loo, the abstract for patent A says it affects wigets in this manner and the abstract for patent B affects wigets in the same or very similar manner." The patent itself will explain what the difference is and why it's different than what everyone else is doing.
There is NO prior art by swissmonkey · 2003-10-02 00:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

Neither IBM's method nor Netscape's method were able to diagnose the failure and point the user to a fix.

This feature is clearly specified in the patent, which the moderator obviously didn't read before making his comment about IBM's prior art.

So this patent is perfectly valid, as no other bug reporting system known currently has this capability.
1. Re:There is NO prior art by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-02 01:09 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  Erm.
  
  a) Lack of prior art does not validate a patent. It also has to BE art, i.e., original and non-obvious. I think we have a serious breakdown at that point with the patent.
  
  b) You have no way of knowing that there isn't prior art. Even if IBM doesn't have it, thousands of other developers could be doing this.
  
  c) If no one is doing it yet, that doesn't have to be because nobody thought of it. It would likely be because such a detailed level of error reporting is unnecessary in the vast majority of situations, and so has made little business sense in the past. Do you mean to suggest that I should patent every business or software direction that *may* be worthwhile in the future, because no matter how obvious it is, all that matters is who does it first? Why not patent a method of logging all system actions remotely? If I patent it today and it's not useful or common for 5 years does that mean it was original and non-obvious? Give me a break, I could write a computer script that came up with ideas like this.
  
  d) The 'differences' MS uses to deny prior art are laughably trivial, such as how most systems are built to only report fatal errors. So what, every current limitation of a program should allow competitive lock-in? If I write an email app that shows 20 emails per page with no setting in its first iteration, my competition should be able to patent 'Method for Arbitrary Pagination in an Electronic Communications Client'?
2. Re:There is NO prior art by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-02 01:38 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  I am no fan of Microsquish, and I think Slashdot is great, but the Slashdot community seriously hurts its credibility with knee-jerk, contempt-laden reactions like the one that opened this thread. So long as M$'s technology represents a novel method, it does not matter that there are prior patents for different methods. So given the given, there is no prior art.
Possible positive side effect by MadKeithV · 2003-10-02 00:39 · Score: 3, Insightful

The patent seems to indicate that Microsoft is focusing on improving the reliability of its software through analysis of failures in the wild.

Now, I don't know about you, but I find that a pretty bad way to go about improving your software. "Yeah it's buggy now, but allow us to analyse the gazillion crashes and we'll be able to reduce them to just a few hundred thousand."

Microsoft patents this, and thereby makes sure that no-one else gets to use this way of working (because we all know how happy Microsoft is about granting licenses to competitors). That's a GOOD THING. Competitors will be forced to use methods like improving the quality of the software through design, not PRODUCING buggy software in the first place, instead of pissing your users off by not only crashing software, but sending a bunch of data across your network, potentially complaining about not having an active connection, and opening up all kinds of exploits by triggering faults deliberately etc. etc.
Re:I think I get it now... by Threni · 2003-10-02 00:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

"By awarding obvious and unoriginal patents, the USPTO's plan was to amass a ton of money so they can have wasteful, luxurious campuses"

Then perhaps a business model where they get $5 for approving a patent but $500,000 for finding prior art themselves would get them and the development community working together again, with some level of trust?
Re:I think I get it now... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-02 00:52 · Score: 1, Insightful

Lawyers are liars. They circumvent patent law as crackers circumvent security devices.

It's time to get rid of software patents. Why isn't there a US section of FFII? In Europe they defeated the patent lawyer lobby groups and reached an amendment to the software patent directive which will reduce patentability to "computer-implemented inventions" only. Hope this will pass the EU minister (judicial!! argh!) council.

We need an international movement against those trivial patents that benefit the lawyer community and patent grabbers (EOLAS ...). World Summit Information Society may be a good platfom to voice our concern.
Re:Contestation period by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-02 00:56 · Score: 1, Insightful

The One-Click-Ordering patent was used by Amazon to get an injunction against Barnes & Noble during the holiday season a few years ago. Barnes & Noble was forced to insert an artificial 'second click' to comply with the injunction. It may have been thrown out since then, but even if it were it seems to have caused ridiculous, real-world damage while it lasted.
By definition by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-02 01:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

"So this patent is perfectly valid"

There's no such thing as a valid software patent.

What most of you snot-nosed kids don't realize is that before the 90's, there was *no such thing* as software patents.

And despite this, lets look at what was invented:
Mainframes
PC's
The Internet (yes!)
Client/Server
Web Browsers
Routers
programming languages

Holy cow, why would people invent all this software if there was no patent?

Since we've had software patents, we've invented...uh.... Well, One click shopping and Microsoft Phone home.

I'll let the reader decide which is a better environment for innovation .
Re:I think I get it now... by jaoswald · 2003-10-02 01:35 · Score: 2, Insightful

Perhaps we could develop a Slashdot reading model which understands that a patent is really about the claims, not about the abstract or a simple short phrase summarizing the patent.

For God's sake, any patent can be summarized into a phrase making it sound obvious, and most patents are actually about some marginally improved twist on a mature technology. That's why they have things like cites of previous patents.

On Slashdot, any new patent gets described in a way that makes a caveman beating two rocks together sound like prior art. I recall some clever LCD resolution enhancement get compared to Wozniak's also clever but completely unrelated scheme for kludging NTSC color out of a TTL circuit.

We need a new moderation "-100 Just doesn't understand."
Re:the US PTO is a profit-center, not a regulator by ratamacue · 2003-10-02 03:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

The US PTO is a money-making service for the government
Seems pretty obvious to me. Government profits off everything it does, because government cannot "fail" as private business can. When your revenue is acquired through force, rather than voluntary trade, the concepts of risk and loss are eliminated. Even when a government program fails miserably, government still profits. I'll cite the "war on drugs" as an obvious example.
Re:Netscape Talk Back? by inburito · 2003-10-02 03:20 · Score: 2, Insightful

You got it all backwards!

Ideas are not patentable!!! Only implementations are patentable! Hence, Microsoft making a specific non-obvious implementation of an already known idea does actually qualify as patentable.

That said, now supposing that the patent is too broad and the clauses encompass prior art then there is a case of stricking out the clauses in question and perhaps invalidating the whole patent.
Re:talkback by AJWM · 2003-10-02 03:49 · Score: 2, Insightful

Microsoft's patent covers non-fatal program failures as well.

So, what's a "non-fatal program failure"? Does that mean it's just wounded, but will get better? Does that mean the program is going to phone home every time the user tries to open the wrong kind of file or the app runs out of memory or the user makes an error? I hope Microsoft is planning on increasing their bandwidth...

--
-- Alastair
Re:Netscape Talk Back? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-02 05:39 · Score: 1, Insightful

although it is not known what information is reported to Netscape

But Talkback is also in Mozilla, and Mozilla is open-source, so that statement is disingenuous.

I'm not familiar with non-fatal crashes in Mozilla. Has anyone seen this?