Slashdot Mirror
Apple Patented by Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "C|net is reporting that Microsoft received a patent on Tuesday for a new variety of apple tree. U.S. Plant Patent 14,757, granted to Robert Burchinal of East Wenatchee, Wash., and assigned to Microsoft, covers a new type of tree discovered in the early 1990s in the Wenatchee area, a major commercial apple-growing region. Dubbed the 'Burchinal Red Delicious,' the tree is notable for producing fruit that achieves a deep red color significantly earlier than other varieties. It is sold commercially as the 'Adams Apple.'" Apparently, the assignation of the patent to Microsoft was an error. Or so they would have us believe ...
MS Air, the most breatheable air you can find arround. Decreased cost on large volume orders of our EULAir licences.
...this is a joke, right? Seriously, if the patent office is given out patents for naturally growing TREES, something is wrong.
Speaking of plant patents: Which patented plant are they smoking at the patent office.
Remember Apple Records' suing Apple Computer for selling music-related products? I bet they REALLY won't like this!
Props to GNAA!
OK, I give up. I see where this is going. Let's skip to the end move now: "Hey, M$, Take my DNA and patent it and put me out of my misery now."
Good for him/her, if you spend all your time scowling at Microsoft your face will freeze that way. Ya gotta smile from time to time. :)
Just in, Microsoft has now patented it's users ! The Copyright Department of the US Gov. issued this copyright after it's head offical recieved an "anonymus" gift of 25,000,000,000. Microsoft claims patenet on it's users due to the fact it has integrated idiots across the nation into it's system, and they can't fuction without it :P
Sun patents the Moon, news at 11...
Unfortunately, in order to eat this apple you're going to have to have two mouths, 350 teeth, and the stomach the size of a small child.
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
Interesting that you can patent a tree you 'discovered', and did not create. Perhaps I'll patent air.
...this goes under the 'Apple' slashdot section?!?
A Microsoft spokesman refused to comment on the substance of the error, but alluded to a secret project named "Money Tree". When corrected that money does not in fact grow on trees, but rather on bushes and shrubs, the Microsoft spokesman paused in contemplation, then ran quickly to his car shouting "Eureka!". Microsoft stock finished up 1/4 to land at 26.30.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Betcha that Microsoft apple gets attacked by a lot of worms called Sasser. Blue Seeds of Death?
Props to GNAA!
A Microsoft representative confirmed that the assigning of the patent to the company was a mistake..
The article does go on to discuss the huge inventory of legitimate tech patents that Microsoft has and how they plan to license more of same.
But the software giant has been a prolific patent generator in other areas. The company embarked on a campaign late last year to generate more revenue from its patent portfolio, offering to license widely used inventions such as its ClearType font technology and FAT storage format.
I think that the writer thought "Microsoft patenting Apple" was a humorous intro to Microsofts rather deep pile of patents.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
"Apple patented by Microsoft."
"sold commercially as the 'Adams Apple'"
We need some more, like...
"Just some more worms for Microsoft"
"Do they have plans for authentication?"
"Microsoft shows the softer side of a monopoly"
...and so on...
webpage
I knew the patent office was slow, but dang. April Fools day was over a month ago...
Apple (AAPL) registered a patent for a new device designed to transmit radient energy from the sun from outside houses to the interior of the house, using 4 glass pieces affixed in a wooden frame. Apple calls their new development a "Window". Apple stock finished up 1/2 to wind up at 26.65
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
What kind of (tree based) data structure is this? How would one go about making it AVL? ...and I thought B-Tree was bad.
$cat
Why should Microsoft have to file a certificate of correction? The process is wrong - What if Microsoft decided 'Hey, we are going to keep the patent. You just try to take it back'. It is the patent office's mistake.
<tinfoilhat place="on">What if the copies of Microsoft Office that were sold to the Patent Office were given a hidden feature of inserting Microsoft into patents that matched specific keywords?</tinfoilhat>
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
Hmmm....Adam's apple, the apple taken from the tree of wisdom. Joy. Just remember, God hath commanded that all ye who tasteth of the forbidden fruit be condemned to hell. Say hi to Billy when you get there.
Said an unnamed representative from the USPTO, "Oops, sorry, that one was supposed to go to Monsanto. Honestly, keeping track of evil amoral corporations these days is a real Pain-in-the-Ass(R)."
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
First SCO says it owns Linux, then Microsoft says it owns Apple... oh the horror!
Does this mean I should expect the blue sky of death?
This is exactly why we should take a serious look at whether the United States should have a patent office at all.) required something governmental to effectively reward the researcher.
The original concept of the patent system was fine in an era or rural agriculture and home shops. The economics of Perfect Competition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
Today that is quite different.
The small, lone inventor is now a myth because 1) research on technical things (Software Patents aside, those are just bad period.) is done now by large universities and businesses who only can license other technologies and pay the research. 2) the patent application system is prohibitively expensive for any small player. Furthermore, so many applications are filed a year, the office spends about 17 hours an application. 17 hours is not enough to have a generally education person (not even necessarily someone in the field) to take a serious look at the invention. The only way one can compete with a patent is through cross-licensing one technology for another which allows the companies in competition to produce the same product. That makes the patent system moot to all but those entering the market, who get screwed.
The argument goes on, but for the sake of briefness I'll cut it off there at a gross generalization.
Why, for the sake of God's Green Earth, can anybody claim a patent on something that has grown in the ground, DISCOVERED (not invented), and not researched. I don't care, quite frankly, who discovered it, I want to know if there was any human invention in its creation. If there isn't, the patent system has failed on a fundamental level because it's. Not. An. Invention.
Are there any nations with sane copyright, patent, and other laws?
It'll be Burchinal Red Delicious version 3.1 before you'd want to bake a pie with one.
This patent only covers a specific type of apple, not apples in general. Plus, I think plant patents opperate a little differently the utility patents, although I really don't know that much about plant patents.
Plant patent information can be found here for anyone that is really interested in the subject.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Rumors are going wild about Microsoft thinking seriously to throw the towel and rename it's invention Aspire.
Achille Talon
Hop!
New Microshatter windows! They spontaneously shatter, allowing you to enjoy the deep blue sky (hereby trademarked as the Blue Screen of Delight)! Pick one up today! And another! And another....
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I would like to contest that it was I and I alone who invented the apple tree and as such I will be suing.
-God
Esoteric reference.
Do you get a patent on flora by finding it growing in a field?
:wq
...but then I got hungry.
With 800,000,000 patents day they just assume it's for MS and then sort it out after, it actually saves money that way.
Your comment could not be validated, a closing sarcasam tag was detected without a matching opening tag or valid doctype please edit your document and try again.
Apparently, the assignation of the patent to Microsoft was an error.
So there's a twist to the tryst?
Perhaps you meant assignment.
It would be an Orchard and can you imagine how expensive it would be to handle the worms and still get productivity?
Stay tuned.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Beware - I've heard that eating Microsoft apples leads to endless core dumps...
I think God has prior art on this one..
Easy there, sport. For the record, I'm on no crusade against "the man". However, the day I put that many expletives into three paragraphs over a story on Slashdot, I'm putting a request into Facilities to move my cube at least 30 more feet from the soda machine.
eom
Oh Come on, at least I didnt say "Imagine a beowolf cluster of these"
This sig intentionally left blank
Trees v2.0
by Joyce Kilmer
I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a patented tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks to God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of Adams Apples [TM] in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only inventors can make a tree.
Life forms should NEVER be patented.
This includes whole species, DNA strands, theoretical life forms, THE LOT.
Companies have NO RIGHT to be patenting life itself, which should be held sacred above all else, for philosophical, ecological and societal reasons.
THAT MEANS YOU, MONSANTO!
SPACEBALLS
:)
Once upon a time warp...
In a galaxy very, very, very,
very, far away there lived
a ruthless race of beings
known as...Spaceballs.
Chapter Eleven
The evil leaders of Planet
Spaceball, having foolishly
squandered their precious
atmosphere, have devised a
secret plan to take every
breath of air away from
their peace-loving neighbor,
Planet Druidia.
Today is Princess Vespa's
wedding day. Unbeknownst
to the princess but knownst
to us, danger lurks in the
stars above...
If you can read this, you
don't need glasses.
----
DVD Details at Amazon
Now, back to work...
---
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
...when you buy MS apples and MS air you get a free MS toaster*
*Please note MS toaster can only be used with MS butter and MS bread
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
How about:
Dark Helmet: (low tone) The way Microsoft manages things it won't last six months.
-Jem...between a rotten apple and Windows XP?
One's probably infested with worms,
and the other one's a rotten apple.
In the past, the existance of a thing prior to the patent seeker's discovery invalidates the patent. You can't patent somthing if there is prior art, i.e. "if it's been done before". If you find somthing occuring naturally in nature, it's been 'done before.' The purpose of a patent is to move information related to such things as fabrications or industrial processes into the public domain. As someone else mentioned 'there are no transistors in nature', and scientific laws cannot be patented just because they're discovered. You have to apply them for a particular application in a new way.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Here in Australia you don't patent plant varieties, you obtain Plant Breeders Rights (PBR) basically it's the same thing. It protects the horticulturalist who came up with the plant from others breeding the plant without permission and without paying royalties.
I read a comment here that you shouldn't be able to do this to plants that were not interbred - plants that grew in nature. What would you say about what happened in our (my family runs a production nursery) place - my late grandfather discovered a mutant plant that had an advantage over what was currently being grown. It was the only one in the lot. Should we have not been able to get PBR on that?
What happened with that plant occurs often in nature, however it rarely gets a chance to be propagated. The plants are all grafted, and it just so happened that this one was a sport (a mutated bud). In the wild, plants do not get grafted. Humans graft trees because it allows us to maintain consistency and grow a plant with certain characteristics as the choice of rootstock has a bearing on how the plant grows and what conditions it can grow in. If you take two plants and cross-pollinate them, the plants that grow from the resulting seeds will all be genetically different - just like humans having babies.
But back to the PBR debate. As you may guess, it takes many years to develop or discover new varieties of plants - it is a very labour intensive and drawn-out process inherent with risks. Should a plant breeder not be afforded protection from unscrupulous operators moving in on his new variety and flooding the market to make a quick buck?
For those that are interested, that mutant plant that my grandfather found was a Kaffir Lime. When we brought the Kaffir to Australia we could only obtain a very limited amount of budwood. We were under an agreement that we could not sell them for a few years whilst we ramped up production (using budwood from the previous years' lot for the next years lot.) because they were a tree that was in such demand that other nurserys would have bought the trees and propagated them, which would have denied the originator their royalties. The variety we grew was the best one to use for cooking - it had an extremely high concentration of volatile oils in the leaves - only problem was that it had big bastard thorns and the damn trees would scratch your arms to shreds (even through a jumper) when handling them. The mutant we found was the same, except it had no thorns! After keeping that tree under lock and key and giving it lots of TLC we took budwood and propagated it, repeating the process over a few years until we had enough to replace the volume of the original variety. The other main variety of Kaffir Lime sold in Australia is a fast-growing variety with large, light leaves and no thorns - only problem is that there's no flavour in the leaves. Go into an Asian grocery store and look at the Kaffir Lime leaves - they're all like the sort that we grow.
Perhaps Microsoft is trying to protect itself against Linux. If the windooze goes down, they will be happily running a gardening business :) Always have something to fall back upon. Though Farmer Billy sounds a little sily :) An apple could easily be used to break windows :)
This is a fair warning. I have just received a patent for "small pointy things growing off the end of an arm". I have decided to call them fingers. The "fingers" were discovered in 1987 at a grateful dead concert. Granted they seemed a lot more significant that night, but that does not matter...
In short, I now have the patent on these and if you are using them without my permission then you are in violation. My legal advisors Mr. Riaa and Mr. Sco have advised me that anyone sending typed correspondance must be using "fingers" and can be named on a mass supeana and sued.
(that counts for mod'ng me down also)
It ain't just Monsanto. Seminis Vegetable Seeds does R&D for Monsanto and other biotech firms. As much as we may really, really think it's wrong to patent life, the fact is money talks and Monsanto has plenty. Want to do something about it? Tough, if you live in the US: GE firms have a lobby almost as large as the pharmaceutical industry and any letter-writing campaign will be hopelessly adrift in the sea of cash surrounding this issue. The US administration and congress listen to campaign contributions, not to "luddite tree-huggers".
As far as backbone, I have to give the EU credit. They stood up to blackmail by the US's bitching to the WTO about their ban on GM foods, and even though the WTO did levy sanctions, the EU gave both the US and the WTO the finger. Still, Seminis maintains GM R&D plants in Holland, France and Italy. Though they can't sell GM stuff there, there's nothing says they can't develop it.
One other small note regarding Terminator Technology (C): Monsanto has said they're not using it, but they're testing it in Roundup Ready crops. Problem is these tests go unmonitored by the FDA, although GM watchdogs have shown that plants using TT genes can infect other plants downwind during pollen season, at worst rendering those plants' offspring sterile, or at least infecting them with copyrighted genetic sequences. Sounds like someone's trying to monopolize human food sources, or does that have a 'conspiracy theorist' ring to it? I guess we'll just have to take their word that they're not using TT genes...
I can't say I'm surprised to see Micro$oft, with their army of rabid patent lawyers hop on the Genetic Engineering train. Who knows what's next?
GOD BLESS AMERICA! Land of the Free Market and home of the Brave Investor.
--Mekkis, self-admitted troll.