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."

Comments

Prior Art: Eclipse Project

[ruckc]

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?

Re:Easy...

[WhiteDeath]

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"

Allow me.

[OneIsNotPrime]

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.