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Microsoft Patents The Task List
theodp writes "'Better not get too fancy with your grocery list, now that Microsoft has patented a glorified form of the to-do list.' Issued Tuesday, the patent covers the use of a 'task list' generated from 'TODO' comments in source code."
// TODO: remove this line or face retribution
I seem to remember using the TODO list feature in Eclipse before it showed up in Visual Studio. Am I wrong?
Sigs cause cancer.
This feature has been in Eclipse for I can recall 2.5 years (not sure on date). The program automatically notices TODO comments in the code and creates a list for you.
What the hell is M$ thinking here?
I'm too young for punch cards however my folks aren't. My father just let me know he has prior art. I'm sitting here with a very dusty item processing program on punch cards. On the cards themselves comments are written about things to be added and depricated. So where do I mail this 10lb stack of yellow cards?
What could possibly go wrong?
I am unsure if their claim is correct but, even if it is, it should have been thrown out as a totally obvious extension to routine, long standing software development methodologies.
No, not quite.....
3. Sue everyone else.
This is what they're up to. I've been pondering what it was that they've been doing over the past year or so with all these settlements of lawsuits, and now we see all these patents being granted -- they're going to bombard the USPTO in patent applications hoping that given the sad state of affairs there that a fair amount like this will be granted, regardless of any prior art.
Then, once a critical mass of patents have been built, they'll bury the US legal system and competitors in so much paperwork for patent infringement that neither the courts nor the defendant parties will be able to react. With patents in hand (legit or not), there's little that the courts can do to them for bringing frivolous lawsuits, and the people being sued won't be able to keep up with the sheer amount of litigation in either time or cost.
Then, once a sufficient amount of patent lawsuit success is obtained and precedents are set, they launch the blitzkrieg against IBM. What better way to fight a patent war than to have your own arsenal of battle-tested patents.
And while all this is going on, they'll be able to do just about whatever the heck they want, a la the bully days of the 90's. Gobble up companies, steal ideas, squelch OSS innovation due to FUD over whether or not a given product is free of proprietary code....it all makes sense....
Damn....it's just one of those things that is so obvious and so simple, yet so well hidden. It may be worth doing a lookup of pending patents with the USPTO to see what's coming up -- I'm guessing the backlog from Redmond is substantial.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Exactly! I've been doing that with grep since Borland packaged it with their C compiler, which was before Windows 3.1 came out. I haven't read the patent, but since patents apply to the concept, not the copyrighted code itself, I'd say there's a good chance that this is prior art.
Open Standards Portal
A patent a day?
At that rate surely IBM (and/or others) have patents for just about everything MS are trying to patent... or for most components of the patents.....
Is "somebody else patented that before you did" a valid argument in patent law?
IBM won't enter into it unless MS are stupid enough to take them on directly, but the little people MS are using as a leg-up for their argument might just be able to say "your patent is just the combination of all these patents, all owned by other people" - which might remove any argument they can throw at you. (obligatory: IANAL)
All that remains is finding time to find all the necessary patents. Perhaps this is a good open project: looking up the patents that cover stuff MS has patents for/is patenting. Make the info available on a web site so anyone under threat has a ready-reference of defenses, and cases they hae been successfully used in. People will still get dragged into court, but it will only take them an hour to do the research, rather than possible years.
Who knows, maybe one day there will be a ruling of "invalid as listed on the Many Silly PATENTS web site - mspatents.net"
To the poster: I agree that many of the MS patents that have been popping up as front page news on Slashdot are ridiculous at face value. Whether that is because they are really so ludicrous, or because the details of a 100+ page patent can't be bioled down to a 1 paragraph summary by one of Microsoft's opponents, I can't say (because I am too lazy to read the stinkin' article). Perhaps it is a 50/50 split. Anyway, this patent doesn't look ludicrous to me from the summary. MS didn't patent a grocery list. They patented the autogeneration of coding task lists based on 'TODO:' comments in the code. This doesn't seem like a glaringly obvious idea to me, and I'm not aware of any prior art. If you are, or it seems glaringly obvious to you, speak up. But don't overgeneralize the patent just to make it sound overly ridiculous - that delegitamizes your argument.
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WARNING:Slashdot karma not redeemable in the afterlife.
Delphi 5 had that feature in it. I know 4 was 1998, not sure of 5's release date, and I'm too lazy to look it up.
What's even scarier. Not only does IBM have a massive patent portfolio... But, since the antitrust trial in the early '80s, they never, ever abuse them. They know just how much damage attracting the government's attention and earning the ill will of the techies can cause. So instead, they take the simplest, most direct road to success. They play fair.
I think you're wrong.
The point is, if Microsoft can patent things like the double click (its actually rather more specific than that), and this automated TODO list, then so can NPCs like EOLAS. Comparing EOLAS to microsoft quickly leads us to one being a parasitic swarm of lawyers looking to get rich of sueing companies that invest in R+D, and the other, rather surprisingly, is Microsoft, who have aparently never filed a patent violation case.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine