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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?
Cue the "We need to abolish the patent system" posts and just get it over with...
I think M$ should pantent mouse clicking. After all, they invented it.
Microsoft (as well as any other corp out there) patents everything they can. The real headline should be "USPO grants Patent to MS for $DUH_GUIFEATURE". That's who your pitchforks should be pointed at unless you'd like to point them at IBM, Apple, Palm, Sun....
"Derp de derp."
THERE IS prior art.
BeOS' Tracker had that in 1999 before anyone else. All windows/instances from the same application are showing grouped in the BeOS Deskbar, under the same sub-menu.
It seems the big difference is in the 'time threshold' part:
"The system organizes like application files and clusters the corresponding taskbar buttons and, upon reaching a threshold limit, creates and displays a group button that contains the like application files and removes the like taskbar buttons from the taskbar. Further, upon reaching a second threshold limit, the system ungroups the application taskbar buttons, displays them on the taskbar and removes the group button from the taskbar."
Big difference? Probably not, but enough for it to be 'new'...
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
You can patent putting similar tools together? Like cut, copy and paste in any application? Or backwards and forwards in a web browser? How about +, -, * and / in a calculator?
What next? Ford applying for and getting a patent on the side-by-side arrangement of foot pedals in a car? Or the standard gear-stick arrangement? How about patenting putting the speedometer and revmeter next to each other? Or the fuel, water and temperature gauges within a certain distance of one another.
The USPTO is crazy. I swear they'd let you patent the colour of the sky if you paid your processing fee.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
While there is probably prior art for this, you have to realize that the issue date in not what determines if the prior art is relevant. It is the invention date or original filing date, which in this case was back in April 2000.
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.
Look at how freaking many people they claim it took to come up with the idea of "grouping similar shit together".
Stoakley; Richard W. (Seattle, WA); Kurtz; James B. (Bellevue, WA); Springfield; James F. (Woodinville, WA); Green; Todd J. (Seattle, WA); Andrew; Suzan M. (Seattle, WA); Mann; Justin (Lake Forest, WA)
Kinda lets you know where your $300 bucks that they charge for Windows XP goes.
BTW, my grandpa had the same idea when he'd keep his roofing nails in one coffee can, and his finish nails in another coffee can. I wonder if I can get a patent for that.
Method and system for clustering and grouping construction nails...
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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
"Grouping in the taskbar has to be one of the most annoying "Features" ever seen in a taskbar."
It is? Funny, I've found it quite useful when having tons of windows open. Is my personal opinion insightful, too?
"Derp de derp."
I've seen it in Win98SE and W2K, in both cases with Symantec Enterprise (for grouping various Norton utilities, like AV, Ghost, etc.). First I saw it was last fall, however.
I'm typically a Linux user, though I use neither GNOME nor KDE, and didn't start using a system tray until this past fall with xfwm4 and the xfce taskbar -- and none of the apps I've used need any grouping.
The patent application dates to 2001; it may possible be valid.
The is the FIRST feature I turn off on any XP computer I encounter. I cannot think of a single more annoying feature than hiding all of the windows I really have under one thing, where I have to spend an inordinate amount of time reaching the icon, waiting for the list to appear, then hunting through the list.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...one of my .sigs used to say, "One day, we'll find Microsoft has patented the alphabet and we'll find ourselves paying royalties every time we sit down at the keyboard."
Now I'm waiting to see if it's a prophesy.
Sure it may seem obvious now...but the first time you saw it, you probably said "oh, that's weird". Even if you had thought of it years before, not everyone did. And they still had a right to patent it since you didn't, and you didn't implement it.
BeOS. Since 1998, and probably much earlier.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Apparently it is.
Which makes me wonder.. is this comment funny?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
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 ----
But you did not do it on a computer. For whatever reason applying decades, centuries, heck, millennium old organizing methods to computers is a patentable item.
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.
"What is the average time to get a patent approved,"
... they often take 2 years to examine your invention on the merits.
It mostly depends on the field of art. Because there has been a huge boom in computer patents, there is a backlog in that department
Once the patent is examined on the merits, the examiner often makes rejections, to which the applicant answers with arguments/ammendments, and that may repreat several times, until the examiner agrees on a version of the application that is patentable. That part may take several years as well.
Three years is not really a long time to get a patent. I have seen some patents that have been languishing for 5 years. And sometimes the delay is not due to the PTO, rather it is the applicant's fault.
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)
Apparently this patent was wordsmithed by a thirteen year old girl: "displays a group button that contains the like application files and removes the like taskbar buttons from the taskbar"
By the perception of illusion, we experience reality
Sure can! Right-click the taskbar, choose Properties. In the Taskbar tab (should be the first one), uncheck "Group Similar Taskbar Buttons".
:)
If you really want it to be nice like 2k, under Start, Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services, disable the Themes service.
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
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?
I'd be satisfied with public flogging of the USPTO employee(s) who issued this absurdity. Twenty lashes per lame, revoked patent ought to do.
You have to wonder exactly what Microsoft's IP department was thinking when they decided to file this patent. Are they really going to go after open source projects with "taskbar grouping?" The negative PR cost alone would seriously outweigh any damages they'd get, not to mention the absurdity of trying to sue an OSS project. More likely, they're filing it so that no one else can file it and then sue Microsoft (e.g. Sun). Which is why patent laws should be changed to allow anything patentable to be "officially" placed in the public domain.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Speaking of KDE, did anyone notice that a KDE mailing list thread from 1999 was referenced in the application? Having followed those lists during that time, I know that a lot of similar ideas were batting around the lists before this patent application was placed. In fact, KDE (3.0, I believe, or maybe even the 2.x series) came out with the taskbar grouping feature prior to the release of XP.
Given Microsoft's tight reign over any software development, I find it unlikely that the idea made it from MS to KDE prior to the release of the version of KDE that had it.
If two parties were independently developing the same idea at the same time, and arrived at it approximately the same time, does this mean the idea was obvious? Or was it simply a sort of zeitgeist - that's the kind of thing people in the field were thinking about at that time.
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!
But Microsoft licensed the Apple trash can back in the 1980's.
That was the whole Apple/Microsoft lawsuit thingy.
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.
[...] That, and it hides my hamstersex.com taskbar entries [...]
h p
My hamster says he'll be happy if you could hide his porn photos too:
http://www.ag0ny.com/misc-20040513-hamster-porn.p
My site
You're making the usual fallacy of putting equals between software patents and silly patents. Which doesn't even hold true in either direction.
/. to bitch and moan about how you should be allowed to steal everyone's work. Whether it's copy-and-pasting someone's algorithm, or downloading every new movie on P2P, or whatever, the ISO-standard /. freeloader should never have to pay for anything.
1. There are plenty of silly patents which don't have anything to do with software. You can find plenty such barrels of laughs as a van with a horse on a treadmill instead of an engine. (Yes, believe it or not, someone patented something as impossible as that.)
2. There are plenty of software patents which are _not_ trivial.
E.g., ever since the GIF patent I keep hearing about how compression algorithms are something trivial and obvious. Well you invent a good new compression algorithm if it's that trivial. _Then_ you can say it's trivial. No, really. Try it.
E.g., I keep hearing the same about various movie and sound codecs. (A la "waah! MP3 shouldn't have been patentable!") You know what? _You_ come up quickly with a good codec, if that's trivial. I'll tell you a secret: back in the early 90s I actually tried coming up with my own algorithm to compress game movies. Turns out I had no bloody clue where to even start.
E.g., I keep hearing about how cryptographic algorithms are no-brainers and shouldn't be patentable. No shit, Sherlock? You try coming up with a new secure algorithm over the weekend, and only then you'll have earned the right to say it's trivial. In practice what virtually every "smart" programmer comes up with is some snake oil idea, like xoring the output of the random number generator to the input stream. Ask a real cryptographer why that's easier to crack than a brown paper bag.
Etc.
To cut it short: It only seems trivial because someone explained an existing algorithm to you already. But try actually inventing a new one. You'll quickly discover why such things are discovered by mathematicians not code monkeys.
In practice some people had to sit and _work_ to come up with that stuff. Sometimes for years. It also took a lot of testing. And someone had to pay for that research work. It's no less research work than, say, a pharmaceuticals company researching and testing a new drug.
Now I do understand that it's fashionable on
However, here's a new idea for all those complaining about patents: if you really want to convince me of your moral high ground, why don't you do the exact opposite? Why don't _you_ give a new algorithm away, instead of asking that others give you stuff for free? Go, actually _invent_ something new, and put it in the public domain.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Of course I noticed the thread -- especially as the reference featured MY NAME in the first place!
:-) ;-)
Of course I was surprised to see that Microsoft seems to patent something that is closely built after my thoughts mentioned on the kde-look mailing list in 1999 already.
One of the problems with considering my thread as prior art is that unfortunately it was implemented by Matthias Elter some months later. It only turned out during implementation that task grouping only becomes interesting if
- the user doesn't use virtual desktops already (because he already organizes his tasks himself already)
- the tasks are only grouped after a certain thresholded is reached.
It doesn't take to be a genius to get that threshold idea because it's just the logical next step once you implement it but it seems that Microsoft actually implemented my idea before we did and therefore realized this tiny step before us.
Anyways it's interesting to see how Microsoft seems to monitor the KDE mailinglists since 1997.
E.g. I had the idea to create kpersonalizer which featured a dialog with a slider which you could easily use to configure the amount of eyecandy versus performance in KDE.
It was funny to see a very similar dialog in XP Betas two months later which contained almost the same wording in some places
So much for cross-polluting ideas between KDE and MS developers
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.