Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Patents Timed Button Presses
ScooterB writes "According to TechDirt, Microsoft has patented having the action of a button determined by how long the button was pressed. From the patent listing, it seems to be targeted towards PDA's and other handhelds." Whether patents like this are the chicken or the egg, this relates to an MSNBC article submitted by prostoalex which says "United States Patent and Trademark Office is overwhelmed with incoming requests," and that "Unless the budgeting increases, the review process for a patent could double to 5 years."
Does anyone else see the need for a distributed prior art review. The idea is fairly simple, when a patent is applied for, it is placed into a queue where anyone who wants to sign up for the job can spend a small amount of time looking for any prior art. If any is found, the user is allowed to upload the data as well as some simple references that can be attached to the patent that would be flagged for review. This should at the very least provide some time savings for the patent officers, and allow all of us (myself included) to quit bitching and help out.
I'll sleep when I'm dead, right now I drink coffee and rub my eyes
An example of prior art:
bash$ xset r rate 250 40
Hmm: Let's see - hold down a key for a brief while:
X
Or hold it down for a long while:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
In 1973 I worked for HP's Medical Electronics Division on the 78221 Arrythmia Monitor. It had a hardware box (about 16"x 4" x 12") with 9 buttons on it, a minicomputer and a bit-mapped graphics display (256 x 256 pixels).
8 of the buttons selected individual patients (it handled up to 8 CCU patients). Pushing and holding the button for several seconds would switch between a graphical display of EKG abnormalities and displaying a summary of ALL 8 patients (showing HR, recent abnormalities, etc.).
In fact, we didn't even have hardware debouncing on the button; we used the minicomputer to sample the signal line and detect when it stayed stable for several milliseconds and treated that as a transition....
This would appear to be VERY similar to the claims in the patent.....
Patents don't protect jack shit. They are created to give a person a temporary monopoly over a object and the right to sue others who try to use that idea.
That's it.
The idea is that it's better to sacrifice the public's ability to utilize a new idea inorder to make it profitable to create new ideas.
Like patented drugs.
A company creates a new drug that is usefull, it can save lives. So they restrict access to the drug to create a profit, then they turn around and take those profits and create new usefull drugs.
The sucky part is that it makes the drug expensive for people that may need it. The good part is that the drug exists in the first place. The company took a risk and created a usefull item from nothingness. Thus it exists.
And because of this then they are free to take the funds created by this patent and create new drugs to patent. If it wasn't for the patent then they wouldn't make money and we wouldn't get new and better drugs as a result.
People who do the innovating are the ones to get money from the innovation and are able then to innovate more.
In fact they HAVE to innovate MORE, otherwise when the patent runs out THEY ARE Shit Out Of Luck.
No more money no more profits.
In a communist country that doesn't have intellectual property laws/rules, then progress is stiffled because the productive members of sociaty have no way to profit, unproductive members benifit equaly to productive ones. Thus productive members have no way to promote new ideas and take risks on their own. Thus over time EVERYBODY suffers.
Just remember the PURPOSE of patents is to promote innovation and progress. NOT to protect ideas. Protecting ideas is what they do, not their purpose. Like when I drive to work, I drive to get to work. I don't drive just to drive, I'd rather just take a nap.
Thus when the patent system is used as a tool to stifle innovation or is simply useless to the majority of sociaty and a drain on it's funds, then it's time to re-examine the patent system and modify it's behavior.
Like for example shorten the life of software patents down to 1 year, instead of the 7 years or whatever. Which is much to long for the fast paced software industry.
Take for example the Jpeg's compression patent. It was valid and usefull for a year or so after it was created, but the creators of the patent all of a sudden suing people years and years later after it becomes a industry standard is obviously counter productive.
I think that the goal buying up these patents is to bring the open-source movement to its' knees.
Patent Lawsuits are PARTICULARLY EXPENSIVE ones to Litigate. They're going to get a massive array of patents and then in a blitzkrieg, they'll fire out an overwhelming number of cease and desist letters to all the key open-source projects that even remotely resemble one of their patents. The end result is going to be a lot of "settlements" because the cost of litigating will be prohibitively expensive (especially for open-source projects). The settlements will basically read, "take down your website / remove the project and we won't sue you out of house and home".
The average open-source programmer would most likely rather close up shop than try to defend himself from a long-drawn out legal battle with MSFT's attack dogs.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.