Slashdot Mirror
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."
--------
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
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
if you look at the patent, it looks like december 2002.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
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.
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.
As I've posted time and again on every "patent on prior art" Slashdot post since 2000 at least: the PTO has gone on record (including in an interview here at slashdot a couple of years ago) to say that the only source they have or use for Prior Art investigations is their own database. If a patent application has been filed on it, there's prior art. If it hasn't, then there isn't any prior art and it never existed before.
The PTO just automatically assumes that anything one person feels worthy of patenting is something that everybody else should have felt it worthy.
That's it. No google, no interviews with field experts, nothing. If a patent's been filed, there's prior art. If not, then it passes the "new" test.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
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