MS Patents IM Feature Used Since At Least 1996

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday October 8, 2003 @03:00AM from the uspto's-perverse-incentives dept.

splorp! writes "Once again, a company is patenting a feature that another company implemented years before. C|Net's News.com reports that patent no. 6,631,412 grants Microsoft the rights to 'an instant messaging feature that notifies users when the person they are communicating with is typing a message.' Excuse me? Does anyone remember Powwow (now defunct)? I remember using that one back in '96 and it alerted the other people to whom you were chatting that you were typing. Or, alternately, it allowed you to SEE the other people typing in real time. Yeah, Powwow is gone, now, but that doesn't mean those features never existed."

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WTF Mod Parent Down !!! by Grummet · 2003-10-08 03:22 · Score: 1, Flamebait

what the hell?
this is informative?

ok, so now everyone who just says things like
"This sucks. You all knew that. Just thought I'd say it too. My boring comment." ...is informative?

ridiculous.
Re:Maybe it's a pre-emptive patent by kawika · 2003-10-08 04:06 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Why IS everybody laughing at him? Doesn't it make sense that Microsoft would want to build up a big patent portfolio that they could use to play ball with companies that try to sue them? IBM has cross licensed their patents for years.

Microsoft holds a lot of patents that it hasn't yet tried to enforce, for example their patent on using Bayesian statistics to filter email.