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MS Patents IM Feature Used Since At Least 1996
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."
ICQ had/has this as well, in the direct chat (not im) mode.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Check out this site for complete details but to lift a few important parts:
a person is not entitled to a patent if the invention was "known or used by others in this country, or was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country" before the date of invention by the applicant for the patent
But later there is a brief comment:
Naturally, if an inventor abandons the invention, he or she cannot obtain a patent.
And finally in support of M$'s patent, and likely the way they got it:
In a fast-changing world, finding a single piece of prior art which discloses the same invention as that claimed in a patent is not the most likely scenario. What is far more likely to occur is that the prior art will be something similar but not identical to the patented invention. The patent statutes also provide for this situation--in a negative manner. Specifically, section 103 of the code provides that a patent may not be obtained "though the invention is not identically disclosed or described [in the prior art] if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art." The test which is posed by this section is whether a worker of ordinary skill, knowing the prior art, would have found the patented invention obvious.
what amazes me is that they filed this in Dec 2002 and in less than 10 months they were awarded the patent. AND there appears to be alot of prior art.
Mabye the USPTO needs to start getting emails, from us, pointing out the prior art.....
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Is to look at it as a necessary evolutionary step. The patent system is broken, in fact the whole IP system is broken. It isn't going to be fixed smoothly and painlessly. It's going to be ripped out by the roots and replaced. But to make that process happen the system has to reach a breaking point in the public's tolerance.
The public is historically slow to act, and is never good at acting on obscure issues, as is the IP world for the most part. Some good things the file-sharing debacle has done are to educate a lot of ordinary people about intellectual property, to demonstrate their willingness to ignore IP laws they don't agree with, and to give people some actual experience breaking those laws and getting away with it. This is surprising and encouraging behavior for an American public that has successfully been dumbed down and convenience-addicted to the point of virtual sheephood.
But it's going to take a lot more pain to get people's butts off their comfy couches in the IP arena, to the point where politicians find their constituents threatening enough to start representing them again. That point is years away, and I want to live through it and into the next Golden Age. So for me, anything that pushes this process along is a good thing, in its own way.