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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."
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The fake Gzip Christ isn't not user number ~0xA6CA7
ICQ had/has this as well, in the direct chat (not im) mode.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Ever think they are patenting it so they won't get sued like the stupid plugin lawsuit for IE. MS has shitloads of patents, most of which they never enforce.
Are you sure this patent grants them the rights to any implementation, or only their implementation?
Btw, would you need to sue MS in order to get this patent overturned, or could you do something like sue the patent office?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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 I find amusing is that it probably took a lot more time filling for this patent than implement the feature.
One must be very creative to describe such a simple feature in so many pages of text!
...AOL and Yahoo were not available for comment.
but they were typing a responce...
Cruise TT
The question shouldn't be, "How can they do this if had it in '96?" It should be, "When did Microsoft apply for this patent?"
This is another example of Microsoft's long history of "innovation".
Errrr, couldn't agree more personally.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
It should be noted that UNIX talk is specifically talked about in the patent and the advantages of this system over it are mentioned. This does not get around the apparant prior art of POWWOW. Remember that it is the claims of a patent that are important, not the abstract. It appears from quickly looking at the claims, that the broadest requirements are for client A to send a message to client B that client A is typing. Then client B must indicate that client A is typing. Finally, that message is turned off when client A sends another message that it is done typing. The initial typing message must be based upon typing within a predefined period of time.
Any prior art asserted against this patent would need to have been in use on or before July 21, 1998.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
In short, this goes back to at least 1967. I'm sure there is no way our esteemed patent office could possibly have found prior art back that far, let alone what happened last week. Someone should alert them to the existence of google.
Wow, I wish I knew as much about Patent law as you did. Perhaps then I could realize that this patent was a continuation application that gets the priority date of its parent application (July 21, 1999).
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I remember it distinctly because my girlfriend's Yahoo wasn't working
Don't worry, it happens to everyone.
About 10 years ago, thousands of free and non-free Minitel (french bbs-like) servers did it.
Including real-time chat that let you see every key stroke of other users.
{{.sig}}
It is obvious that the patent office is ignoring the prior art clause. Why not just file a criminal charge against the staff of the patent office and use the law to stop this kind of behavior. If the office is failing to perform it's job why not confront it in a court of law? Hell you could push as far as treason if need be (only takes two witnesses last I checked) as a conscious act to undermine the Constitution, federal law, and confront it as an act of economic sabotage. There are plenty of ways to confront the problem. I find it odd that the EFF and ACLU have not touched the Patent Office in earnest. What is protecting the Patent Office such that even basic avenues are not used? At the point that the Patent Office has ignored it's purpose I would most likely pursue legal action first based on ignoring the law and establishment of the "Prior Art" rules and if there is still no change after that, move to the treason avenue. Sad to say that treason is becoming more and more reasonable when looking at the larger picture of the Patent Office problems.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
So the claimed innovation here is simplifying real-time, continuous updates by just sending activity updates. Hmm. I'm not sure that really passes the tests for either "obvious" or actually "innovative", but at least they address talk.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
I'm not so much bothered by the prior art issue -- I have a much bigger issue with this patent. I'm willing to bet that if you were to take an average programmer and ask them "how can I modify this IM program so that the person you are talking to knows that you are currently typing without actually sending each character as you type it?", they'd come up with the exact same solution as described by this patent.
Unlike many on slashdot, I actually believe there are some scenarios where software/algorithm patents are applicable. However, the standard questions still need to be asked: does this do something useful, and is the implementation non-obvious? Why (aside from purely financial reasons) are patents like this being granted?
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
If you read the patent, you will see that TALK and other prior chat systems are mentioned in the references and body of the patent. The specific "innovation" here is that the system polls for activity on a timer, and turns on and off the "user typing" message based on activity during the timer period.
/. as prior art. Even Yahoo's "user is typing" simply toggles on and never turns off if you abandon typing. Is polling periodically obvious? Surely. Remember, the USPO is a profit center, and granting obvious patents brings profit to both them and patent attorneys, so there is no motivation not to allow such simple changes to be patented.
While I think that it is absurd that this was granted, it is not any of the things being thrown around on
Sig under construction since 1998.
With those blue 'bubbles' that appear over the player's head when he starts typing, and disappear when complete.
This exact feature was in wide use at MIT in '89 if not earlier - the zephyr instant messaging system used by nearly all students at MIT when I was there ('89 to '94) had this feature, along with essentially every other feature currently use in IM clients. This is BS. I'm not sure if zephyr is still in use at MIT, but this is certainly NOT something new.
this is a continuation of a previous application with a 1999 filing date. the effective date of the application, the begining of its patent protection, and the date of which prior art must be earlier than is July 21,1999.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
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.