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Microsoft Patents Grouped Taskbar Buttons
I_am_Rambi writes "According to the US Patent office, patent #6,756,999 belongs to Microsoft. The patent this time is grouping taskbar icons processes. This is included in Windows XP, and some prior art in X. Looks like it was accepted two days ago."
Was the prior art in X prior to Windows XP's release and/or wide beta?
GNOME did this before Microsoft did I seem to recall. The date of the Patent Application is 2001 - I do not know if GNOME did this then. I am surprised if the concept was not published prior to Microsoft's application though.
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
I just know someone's going to tell me you can do it in Window Manager XYZ, and if I'd just googled it, I'd know that. But if not, then I could actually celebrate that I had an original idea for once and go eat a steak dinner. Or maybe I should just go eat steak anyways.
I suppose it's time for some civil disobedience.
When it came to civil rights, people had to be willing to go to jail, willing to pack the prisons, to bring decency to the law.
Now, perhaps, it's time to be willing to go to civil court to bring sanity to the law. Maybe it's time to simply ignore patents on which there is known prior art. It's certainly not going to be an easy decision to make, to risk lengthy and expensive court proceedings. But maybe letting the owners of ridiculous patents stuff the courts with enforcement cases is an appropriate way to prod Congress to action.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Wich is a behaviour that makes it really annoying, because you have to switch your mind-gears between "searching among open windows for the useful window" and "search for the app icon and then navigate to the useful window". I'd rather have "grouping always" or "grouping never", the latter being what you get when you disable the grouping 'feature'.
When a case such as this is won, and the patent is revoked, is there any funding that is returned to the side that won to recover litigation costs?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It always helps to actually read the claims:
Claim 1 simply says that if for example you have a button for a word file x.doc (handled by winword.exe) and the system receives a request to create a button for y.doc it will figure out that x.doc and y.doc are both handled by winword.exe and place the button for y.doc adjacent to the x.doc button. That's all there is to it!
Couple corrections to other postings
- you do not claim prior art (it's not yours, is it) you disclose your knolwedge of prior art; that helps the examiner figure out the diffs
- the mentioned threshold talks about available space; not how much time has passed
Lastly, the innovation seems to be in the method for deciding how to arrange the buttons (claim 1)
all other claims are based on that method. Claims 2 & 3 (grouping) are novel when implemented using the method of claim 1.
By definition if the patent has been granted, than there is no prior art that is the same as the invention. To the extent that another system achieves a similar objective, it must be using a diffenrent method.
bah, they can have the power button patent. I would just like to see who ever patented the reset button for laptop lax the fees a bit, its been years since I had a laptop with a reset button. And holding the power button while I conplate the meaning of life sucks.
I think all this patenting is actually a bad move on m$'s behalf..
Think about it, if they keep patenting little stupid things like this as an attempt to cripple and slow down alternate desktops such as X from advancing in the market place then this in the long run is probably a bad move,
As it's already been proved many times that if you make something not possible for someone they will work out a compromise and at least 70% of the time come up with something better and more efficient.
Obviously the desktop war is far from over but the industry needs innovation (Even if it has to be forced into it)
Could the macintosh dock's function be considered grouped taskbar buttons? Multiple windows of a single application are all associated with a single button... It's not the same, but depending upon the wording, it might fit. I'm not saying it's prior art by any means, but it could pose a problem to mac users.
OpenLook did this with one of the default installed window managers on Sun 386i installs. That's in the 1980s. That does not eliminate the novel and non-obvious actions based on timings. Many patents are aggregations of non-patentable concepts or separately patented items. Look at any patent for some automotive device and you'll see lots of follow-on patents. It not like the basic idea of an automatic transmission would be granted a new patent (well maybe given the current USPTO :) but certainly one could use a novel fliud and valving setup (say an automatic transmission for extreme environments that uses molten tin for a combination lubricant and working fluid) and that would be patentable. In fact the above probably was patentable by anyone before just now, and I have a year to file in the US for it... Although from what I hear a combination of the BeOS tracker and tweak UI could achieve the results in 1999 prior to the MS filing date. So maybe there is a case if one were to care enough to wage the battle. Personally I like the Mac OS X dock behavior of listing the windows in a pop-up along with some common functions. It keeps me from bouncing around the display so much once you get ysed to it.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Emacs has exactly this sort of feature in its buffer selection menu. If you have a large number of buffers open, it will group them by mode in a menu for buffer selection (so for example, all c-code buffers are grouped for one submenu, all text buffers in a separate submenu, all python buffers, all TeX buffers etc)
On the other hand if only a few buffers are open, then you are presented with a single list.
You can even customize the behaviour to determine the point at which this splitting will take place.
Whether double clicking or alternate functions based on how long a button on some gadget is pressed, it's been done before and it's a bogus, bullshit waste of the legal system's time to have ever filed it.
Bill Gates and his crew should be ashamed. I didn't think even he would be so ignorantly, selfishly, and stupidly greedy as to patent the bloody obvious that's been done for years. Power switches, reset buttons, PDA backlight functions, there are dozens upon dozens of examples much older than the filing.
Bill needs to take another look at his legal staff -- somehow one of his SCO drones managed to get back in the building, or thinks that just because Microsoft covers the paycheque means they're supposed to be filing patents on Microsoft's behalf instead of SCO's.
Either that, or Bill is trying desperately to distract us from something that is actually important, like some tabled piece of legislation we haven't noticed.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I don't wish to seem petty, but the examples you give are NOT software. They're mathematical algorithms which could be implemented in software if you wanted. Or you could build dedicated hardware to do it, or you could work it all out by hand, (in theory), or anything else you fancy.
Just because somebody invented something, does not mean that he has supreme right over that thing. Do you think humanity will be where it is now with software patents ?
I'll paraphrase the same question right back at you: do you think medicine would be where it is today, if anyone was free to brew in a bathtub the formula you've spent half a billion to perfect? Why the heck would anyone invest in pharmaceutical research at all, if that was the case?
Yes, you could argue until you're blue in the face about how that would be good. You could buy cheaper medicine, for example. But then noone would invest in producing _new_ medicine. Good luck if your disease doesn't go away with just penicilin and/or aspirin, because in your ideal world noone invented anything newer than that. You're gonna die, but hey, surely that's a small price to pay to keep those greedy corporations from patenting obvious chemical formulas.
You see, the point of patents is to stimulate research. Yes, you pay for it by having a 20 year interval in which someone gets to collect royalties for their investment. But the benefit in the long run is that you actually get research.
Well, see, same thing with software. Do I think we'd be better off, if anyone started patenting software algorithms since 1950? Damn right. We'd have had more people actually paying from research, instead of just hordes of people copy-and-pasting the same code over and over again. (Algorithms copied from a book via memory, for all practical purposes I'll consider to be copied-and-pasted.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've never heard this argument that crypto patents (et al) are trivial. The argument I have heard is that this is the implementation of a mathematical method.
Now, a lot of folk think that maths is about discovery of relationships that are consistent with the current mathematical/logical framework (like pure science). Further, that this isn't _invention_ (though it is very worthwhile and highly skilled work that I greatly admire). [You appear to think that maths is discovery and invention?]
So, the only bit left to be an invention then is the programming an algorithm into a computer, given the algorithm. This can be simple - technical but not inventive, the sort of thing programmers commonly do.
Often, it will be hard because of the optimisations required. So, claim the optimisations in a patent, but the mere implementation of the algorithm isn't inventive IMO. Basically, I don't think that mathematics is (nor should be) patentable. This way anyone can use the basic mathematics and produce their own optimisations.
PS: I don't think the optimisations should be patentable either (different argument). But I do feel that there is a strong argument that if anything else is patentable that such optimisations (that make inventive use of the platform) should be considered to have an inventive technical effect and so be patentable.