Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Wants More Credit for Inventions
theodp writes "Bill Gates said Thursday that Microsoft expects to file 3,000 patent applications this year, up from a little over 2,000 last year and 1,000 just a few years ago. 'We think--patent for patent--what we are doing is, if anything, more important than what others are doing,' said Gates, perhaps referring to 'Organizing and displaying photographs based on time,' which the USPTO published just hours before Gates spoke."
And the best part of the article:
1 00-1008_3-5205574.html?tag=nl
The link to this other article http://news.com.com/Apple+patented+by+Microsoft/2
"Apple patented by Microsoft
Apparently, intellectual property does grow on trees.
Microsoft, amid an IP spree that has won the company patent protection for everything from XML dialects to video game storage methods, mistakenly 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."
Yes I know the patent has been acknowledged as a mistake but it makes you wonder how many of these 3000 patents are going to be approved because someone got tired of paying attention to the fine print.
http://nyamenation.org/
Showing photos according to when they were taken? PRIOR ART!!! Photo developers have been doing this for ages, in software and on actual film! PhotoCD anyone???
Is it just me, or is the display of photos by time on a calendar exactly what Photoshop Album 1 did?
Hurrah for innovation!
when we relate/measure producitivity with patents...
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
When will all of this be stopped? How can a company hold thousands of patents on software. Is anything that unique? What does it even matter, they are closed source. Nobody can steal code from them, but they can look at OSS and say "thats our idea."
Steal This Sig
with the most lawyers always wins.
rule # 1 kiddies - if you cant invent, buy more lawyers. and then claim you invented it.
If you've ever seen the movie High Fidelity the main character decides to organize his albums not by title or genre, but by autobiographical so that if he wanted to find an album he had to remember when he bought it. Well just for fun I decided to do the same thing with my porn collection using iPhoto. Now I can see how my tastes in porno have changed and grown more sophisticated over the last 7 years. And wow I was into some pretty kinky shit as a 12 year old.
The only reason Microsoft is filing all these patents is because they want to get ahold on every freaken idea that anybody could *ever* come up with. That way, when someone else decides that they want to create something (AKA, create a new OpenSource project), they may just not be able to do it anymore.
Also, Bill...hate to break it to you, buddy. But you're doing just what a ton of other people are doing every day. Get a grip on the ol' ego.
I never had a real problem with MS before -- but this just takes them down quite a few notches. (About 3000 notches to be exact.)
Dont get me wrong, Microsoft spends quite a lot of money on R&D but patenting a invention or in some cases the lack there-of is standard practice for any company. Microsoft should focus on Quality not Quantity.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
In their defense, they got hit by very absurd patent lawsuits. So now they want to grow fangs of their own. I don't blame them.
I blame the stupid patent system and I'm very amazed and disappointed that Congress and the American people seems to think it's all good (or are oblivious to the problem).
Microsoft really wouldn't be where it is today if software patents existed back when they started.
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt
They should have a little more respect for the name of Technology.
Sun, Yan-Feng; (Beijing, CN) ; Zhang, Lei; (Beijing, CN) ; Li, Mingjing; (Beijing, CN) ; Zhang, Hong-Jiang; (Beijing, CN)
They must have looked at the source code M$ sold the Chinese. Good thing M$ co-opted them or they would have had to put SCO on their case for stealing ideas. I'm going to barf.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
once their patent on the blue screen of death goes through ...
...
they will be getting payouts left and right for that
it is by far the most ubiquitous of PC conventions that has ever been seen.
As the old adage states, in its many forms, that the one thing ``they'' can't take away from you is knowledge. While true, Microsoft can still own it.
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
it took four people to come up with that!
I know this has been ranted about on slashdot, but why are patently obvious procedures patentable?
I'd be curious if anyone can suggest a good rule for eliminating obvious patents. Perhaps a rule that states that a method which mimics electonically what is done by other means cannot itself justify issuing a patent.
In the referrring patent, Microsoft pretty much has patented the procedure for looking at things with dates on them and sorting them in order of the date. Now, I understand if Microsoft patents the method they used to extract date information encoded into a photograph, but this patent is way too broad.
You think the CIA can operate without software that manages photographs in a chronilogical order, how about the FBI.
Next they'll be patenting the organization of paper. And, since they used Clippy, they'll claim a patent on paper clips which aren't in use.
If the DOJ makes another move against them, MS countersues the government
'Organizing and displaying photographs based on time' surely has some prior art??!!
Countries like China and Russia, that are powerful enough to stand up to the US, will simply ignore those so called patents and innovate. to better their peoples' lives. We in the "third world" will follow. The Chinese are already in space, don't you think they have "trampled" on some US patents? The world will move on one way or another...with or without M$ and its patents.
It appears Microsoft are intent on owning the rights to just about everything. Could it occur that in the future, one day M$oft could own the rights to anything you do in their programs? It's quite scary when you think about it. One day, a computer company could own everything, have the legal rights to everything without any liabilites, and maybe even pull us into a seudo-orwell society. Scary, but is it possible?
Sleep, she is for the weak..
Am I the only one who thinks there should be a yearly limit to the number of applications one company/person can file? 3000 seems excessive.
I know it sucks at the moment, but what about when they all expire? Unless the extend the time of patents (which wouldn't suprise me) then all of this will be out of patents in about 15 years. Sure it's a while but from what I can see well have alot of patents for the next 5 years or so until most of the normal stuff has been patented then we'll wait for another 15 years then anyone can use them.
In the short term it's annoying but in the long term it's not that big a deal.
'we think what we are doing is more important than what others are doing' -- how god damned full of himself is this guy? and what is this 'we' shit anyway? has he done anything since checking the code on the Altair BASIC interpreter that one time?
The More Laws, the less Justice --Marcus Tullius Cicero
I did not fully realize your joke at first until I re read the parent. You should be a patent judge
Microsoft patents three finger salute. Whiny boy scouts claim prior art. Bill Gates derides scouts as religious cult, and threatens to sue the pimply freaks into oblivion.
Patents are a joke, and they need reform.
and my pc automatically sorts by date.
oh wait, they "innovate" by stealing everyone else's ideas. Maybe they will put out a patent on that.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I always knew your company is inventing superior things every day. I just wonder what kept MS from implementing any of them? Sincerely yours -
I don't read replies by ACs.
Microsoft has a video of the app that uses this patent
7 5#14275
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=142
Sure they wouldn't exist if software patents existed 30 years ago, but they now have domination of the market.. and they will stop at nothing to perpetuate their power and control... They could care less about the rest of the market's ability to grow...
This is just another part of the long term strategy..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I used to work closely with an engineer from FANUC, and he claimed (heresay now) they each employee had to apply for a new patent each year. And those that had one awarded were treated well.
Wake up.
For those that are too lazy to RTFA, this is probably the most important part of it :
The push for more patents comes as Microsoft is trying to boost the licensing of its intellectual property to other companies, an effort that began last year.
That pretty much sums it up right there. Exactly what do these guys want? Being one of the largest, most proliferated company on the planet isn't enough, apparently.
Don't think this is freaky yet? Check out this article and realize the strategic use of patents in influencing a market. They have all the money to do this too, which is the scariest part. Patents aren't about protection any more, it's about CONTROL.
The second was (after actually reading the entire patent), That's my idea!
I had been working around some ideas to organize my photos by data and decided that the comment headers present on JPEGS and GIFS would be the perfect place for a date stamp. I was going to write some scripts to manage a library organized in this fashion when I realized that it wouldn't prove nearly as useful as I would have hoped unless the digital camera would store a date in the same way... I had mostly forgotten about it until I read this.
Phooey.
John Hancock
That's it. I'm changing majors. First all the jobs go to india, then MS decides they'll patent everything you could hope to develop anyway.
why bother.
fuck this shit.
I'm gonna learn something else for a change.
'nuff said.
And I quotith:
"We're at an early state on that but it is something that we are pretty excited (about)," Gates said,
As I said in the subject, me thinks he needs a hobby. Getting excited over patents, now that is just plain concerning.
Karma? Hey I just call it as I see it.
Although I don't endorse patent whording done by microsoft, the title for the patent is grosely misleading. It makes it sound like Microsoft just patented all motion pictures... but not quite.
The patent application states:
"For instance, the technique determines whether the time information is digitally encoded in the image file, or whether it is embedded within the image data itself. The technique next includes extracting the time information from the photograph image file using a technique appropriate to the identified manner in which the time information is stored, to produce extracted time information."
Simply put, the pictures are organized and displayed in a manner according to data embedded in the image file itself... which is halfway innovative.
Although pretty basic and easy to do on your own, it, I assume, can warrant a patent.
The only truly unique technology Microsoft ever invented is their secret algorithm that is able to generate errors in such a way that every user experiences at least one unique problem never seen by anyone else. Microsoft's software beats all others in this aspect. No other software can match the sheer randomness of the errors produced by Microsoft operating systems, which is why people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars more for it than they would have spent on otherwise superior Open-Source operating systems such as Linux.
"what we are doing is, if anything, more important than what others are doing"
I hate you you egotistical fuck. If you could please just go crawl up under a pile of shit and die...perhaps your rotting fumes couwouldld provide some inspiration to others (us dumb folk) in the world.
How dare you claim that what you are doing is more important that what others are doing. I hope you die. I mean I really really hope that you just drop dead somewhere you fucking peice of shit.
what?
Patents still expire in about 20 years. unlike say copyrights that will last longer than you will. Like something that Microsoft has patented, you can safely put it in open source 20 years from now, a long time, but most of us will live 20 more years. (barring the end of the world or some such of course)
So far Microsoft has just collected patents, generally only using them for defense. If the trend continues you might get by with using that Microsoft patented thing today since Microsoft doesn't really seem to care. I wouldn't because they might change at anytime, but history says you are likely to get away with it. Microsoft has threatened to start enforcing their patents, but so far nothing has come of it. (I can't recall any exceptions where Microsoft actually struck first, though they might exist)
is what will kill FOSS.
One company, with literally BILLIONS of dollars and a war-chest full of patents, versus...redhat and a spattering of rag-tag "non-profit" organisations.
Folks, we don't stand a fucking chance in HELL![1]
[1]dispair void in laos and where-ever else USian laws are not enforced.
But how can you patent a method of doing someting? If you think about it preparing and cooking scrambeld eggs has a method to it, could I patent that? If this patent orgy continues how long before OSS comes to a brick wall because every bloody idea, method, and algorithem etc... has been patented by a company with lots of cash and lawyers? Look at what happed to id software and Creative. The general public does not know what is happening and they will never know unless we educate them. And if we do educate them will they even care? And the patent office employees, do they even have to be certified to handle the patents that are presented to them?
I understand the basic ideas behind patents but when they are taken to the limits like this it really shows just how flawed the system is. And if this madness keeps on going there will definatly be trouble in the future.
Would I be right in thinking iPhoto automatically organises the 'photo library' based on data embedded in the photo in regards to the time and date the photo was taken?
Would this be considered prior-art?
The USPTO is populated by people who don't grasp the fundamental concept that IT systems and programming are about abstract concepts applied to specific requirements. Object oriented programming, GUI event frameworks, network interfaces, RMI, RPC, XML, it's all about abstraction.
The application of those abstract techniques and utilities to solving a particular business problem is not a patentable idea. It is a fundamental concept of the industry.
We now have the USPTO not merely patenting business concepts, but architectural concepts and theoretical interfaces like the association of time with an image. It's absolutely insane -- they are allowing Microsoft to patent a naturally observable attribute of a real-world object. Everyone knows a picture has a time associated with it -- even portraits that were painted over the course of weeks are still associated with a fuzzy time value. How the hell can you possibly patent the idea of associating time with a picture, no matter what the media, formats, or protocols involved?
Patent law itself states that you cannot patent a natural process, and the application of a general tool to a specific function is a natural process of computing.
From this fundamental misunderstanding, we end up dealing with a patent system that allows a company like Amazon to patent the use of abstract behavior templates in regards to a real-world object, the shopping cart.
That's just insane. You cannot patent something which any IT resource with a knack for abstraction can observe, and there are hundreds of thousands of such people. You cannot patent the idea that a car has a color, nor could you patent the idea of a picture of a car changing color each time you click on it. Yet some USPTO employee without a wit of sense or understanding of fundamental computing techniques and philosophies thinks that it's reasonable to think an abstract action like a mouse click associated with a catalog object is a patentable concept.
It's nuts. It's just insane. The USPTO needs to distinguish between use of abstract concepts that are a natural part of computing, and genuine art in implementing general-purpose abstractions.
No matter how disagreeable it might have been, the specifics of how a GIF image file is constructed and compressed is a patentable expression of an abstract image. So is any other image file format.
But the idea that it is an image file, that it has attribute values such as author or creation date embedded in it, or that it has an associated set of attributes like creation date, storage size, etc. are not patentable concepts. They are just natural attributes of an abstract image.
*sigh* We are truly doomed, not because of OSS or Microsoft or because the corps pay off the government so they can use the legal system and patent office as a business model. We are doomed because the people responsible for protecting the people from being fleeced by the con-artists don't have a freakin' clue how to recognize aggressive abuse of the legal and patent systems.
Even when it is recognized, we have governments who are paid off by the corps who benefit from the abuse of the very social systems that are supposed to protect us from such abuse. Or do you think it was an accident that Microsoft's penalty for blatant illegal action was reduced to monitoring and a wrist slap, while IBM and AT&T had been broken up for far lesser offenses? Change of government, change of legislators who've been paid off, and the penalties go away.
Thanks to a legal system that allows corps to drag things out long enough to buy themselves a change of law or government before a ruling or settlement are issued, and you have a system that is ripe for abuse, and the largest of predator corps are abusing it for every dollar they can hope to garner. Nor am I singling out Microsoft -- SCO, Enron, and dozens
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Microsoft is more important because Microsoft has more money. And if you do not agree Microsoft can buy your life out from under you.
The particular method of arranging image files described, including creation of mirroring text files, defaulting to sorting by file creation date if there's no mirroring text file, is a pretty exact description of what has been performed for many years, at least since the DOS 3.1X version of the Isys Desktop search engine, i.e., since 1991 when I first used it. And given how much development work Microsoft has been doing on local computer and network search engines, it's bloody unlikely Microsoft doesn't know about it.
'Organizing and displaying photographs based on time,'
ls -ltr
Bam.
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
Oh no, they made it to space. I sure hope they didn't infringe any American patents. Considering that the US put a person in space in 1960, and that US patents only last 20 years, I dont think anyone involved with the flight can really say anything if the Chinese stole those "secrets".
Meanwhile in this pit of backwards technology, American PRIVATE CITIZENS are going to space.
Once again, that little thing called reality gets in the way of the slashdot opinion.
I think Mr. Gates is eager to experience the taste of what Newton, Einstein, Turing, Bram Cohen have experienced. But without any major and substantial scientific/technological contribution, any attempt to this is unreal. Amount of patents doesn't tell anything; one single achievement like BitTorrent beat all words. If he's for money, there are more effective approaches to this...
Anyone can file a patent or seek protection of a technology. The question is - will people pay to license it? Look at IBM - research pays for this firm as they rake in massive licensing revenues every year. What does MS have that others will pay to license? Thats the rubber/road issue for any protected tech.
Microsoft patented France.
no, let them do 3000 or 5 million, but increase the price by 5% for each additional one, kind of a reverse bulk buy policy.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
So now people will not be able to sort they pictures by looking at the stamp created by the camera? Or by the order in the film strip. Yeah, right, a pretty innovative thing. :-P
Microsoft was victimized by patent pirates. These are companies that selectivily aquite a patent not to produce products, but to litigate others. There is no defense against such things except a lot of money. Having patents yourself is meaningless in defending yourself from a patent pirate since they have no interest you can harm, no matter how many patents you have. So this is NOT the reason for Microsoft to choose to aquire patents at such a rate, often on rediculous things (like pronouns in computer languages for example).
The second purpose of having patents is to defend yourself against others who have patents, However, to do so does not require a large portfolio, but rather a strategically placed one. For example, while IBM may have thousands of patents, a few dozen well placed patents could well be sufficient to hold an effective "balance of power" to assure mutual destruction through litigation and preliminary injunctions. Given even just a few dozen key patents and their large cash reserve, they could potentially outlast even IBM in a real patent deathmatch complete with freeze of business injunctions, or anyone else who has a large patent portfolio of their own and a real business as well to protect.
The more likely answer is similar to why IBM aquired a patent portfolio, as a means to extract money from others in the marketplace. Given their business practices, it can also be used as a means for them to exclude others from the marketplace through cross license deals with existing players, a kind of old boy network via patents. But it has NOTHING to do with defence against others, don't get taken into the false claim of "poor microsoft the patent victum". If Microsoft really cared about protecting themselves, and others in the market, they would lobby for real patent reform to eliminate patent piracy rather than what they are currently doing which is itself just a lesser form of patent piracy.
What are the odds M$ will try to patent the newsbot service they just ripped off from Google?
The lawyers always win. The person with the most lawyers comes in second place.
Microsoft aiming to build a portfolio of patents to licences is the product of Marshall Phelps, a very shrewd multiyear plan.
Software programmers, mathematicians and IT architects are either going to have to sell their souls out for a few coins of silver (patent incentive) or stand up now and state that software patents are detrimental to society and only benefit corporation coffers in the long haul.
Be very sure the only ones that truely benefit long term are the corporations.
Sure the initial team gets a $1K each however the 20 year monopoly that a patent ensures the corporate inventor is showered with more than enough management poo.
MS will patent stuff from workers who make $7/us an hour and make millions for 20 years -- that is the truth.
Here's the best way to benefit society with software patents -- Write your governement official to move software patents to a new class of intellectual property which guarentees a slice of the 20year revenue -- to the inventors not the company.
"We think--patent for patent--what we are doing is, if anything, more important than what others are doing."
Sounds to me somebody needs a hug?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I believe there's already prior art with digital encoding of information within a image. It's been done.
I don't mind waiting fifteen years to organize my photo collection.
A quote from IBM: "For each of the past 11 years (1993 - 2003), IBM has been granted more U.S. patents than any other company. During that period IBM has received 25,772 US patents. In 2003, IBM received 3,415 U.S. patents, breaking the record it set previously for the most US patents received in a single year."
Gotta admit thats kinda impressive...
Microsoft may want to earn more respect now that they have started to share their $60+ billion war chest with their stock holders. Fair enough. But they can't earn my respect my just saying that they did 2,000 patents last year, and may do 3,000 this year -- so what? Lets see some sustained performance or at least publish their sustained historical performance...
The question is can they deliver patents over the long haul... they already got the easy ones... Patent No. 6,748,582 (Microsoft's patents the "to-do list").
I am forgetful but not yet impr,eTOEd...
This constant patent issue is horrifing. I want to patent the art of patenting retarded patents.
What do I have to do to get a sig around here?! www.bearscanfly.org
How is this modded interesting? They might be Chinese but they're MSFT employees, they're not Chinese government bureaucrats looking at the Windows source code. And what does this have to with SCO??
So, I'm forced to explain myself.
By using Chinese slave labor they can patent twice as much as they did before. If chronological picture presentation is an indication of the quality of the new patents, I'm afraid that M$ is not getting much for their money. Pity the USPTO does not see it that way and will now keep us all from writing programs that present photographs in chronological order by doing such obvious things as looking at the file date and image metadata. I mentioned SCO because they are also involved in a huge M$ IP theft scheme. The M$ motto is, what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine, sign the dotted line, bitch, you're mine! I submit.
Got it yet? You will if you ever try to do anything for yourself and share it with your friends. By God, that would make you an IP thief because everyone knows that M$ make everything.
Ugh, not even Big Brother was brazen enough to take credit for everything. He was able to claim the helicopter, but not the airplane.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...perfecting the technique of causing mass frustration stretching all the way from the individual consumer to entire governments through the release of buggy software and the use of questioable business practices to guarantee that the very same buggy software is used in place of better alternatives.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
The answer is: 10,000 lawsuits in a gigantic SCO like silhouette.
Wow, I really cant beleive all of this. USAs software has nowhere to go but down (the drain). The very element that makes America "great" is "Freedom of Speech" and yet, by releasing the ability to patent software, people like Billy Boy are slowly declining you guys that right. Makes me glad I live in teh g00d ol' UK!
On a side note, how in hell can one patent an apple??? They didnt invent it!!!
Actually, if anyone wants to bother to take this to court, this patent will most likely be declared as "invalid" because it clearly doesn't meet the requirement of being novel and non-obvious.
Even the best lawyers can't pretend that this is novel or non-obvious.
Patents cost a bit of money, but nothing that is prohibitive enough to prevent an entity from submitting several thousand patent applications. Here is my idea:
Keep the initial cost the same, be it $100 or $1000 an application (I have no idea how much). If the idea is found to be original and non-obvious, then the patent is awarded, yada yada yada.
If the idea is found to have prior art, is obvious, or could be created by a natural process, then a fine should be levied. We'll say $5,000 a failed application, for the "waste of time" of the workers of the patent office. An additional $5,000 can be levied for every application that is illegible, or written in such a way that it could cover a broad range of things (ie, this process covers all entities, movements, and processes which don't not fall into the realm of physical and mental states.). Malicious pantents could be considered a capital crime, calling for the heads of the submitters (yes, extreme is nice sometimes).
This will end up benefitting the private enterprises and small people, since they're the types that will spend a couple thousand, and put time into research that the idea is original... non-obviousness should be obvious (unfortunately, everything is non-obvious to USPTO employees). This will be prohibitive to those huge conglomerations that try to mass-patent everything in existance with tens of thousands of patent applications. If 1,000 of them are rejected, then the fine is around $5 mil.
Lastly, if a patent is revoked, then the entity that filed the patent should be held accountable for the blockage of progress by society in general, and be legally and financially liable.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
I have some questions that people who are no IANALs might be able to answer. It's all related to software patents, not "real" patents.
- A patent granted by the USPTO does that mean that the patent is valid only in the USA or all over the world?
- Does a patent granted by the USPTO mean that the software I make available outside the USA can't be obtained by people inside the USA? (point of sale: outside the USA)
- If people inside the USA obtain my software from a source outside the USA, are they in conflict with the law and what can be the consequences for them?
- If I'm taken to a local (non-USA) court for it, what should be the ruling about it?
- What will happen if I arrive in the USA? Can I be taken to court for these things?
Anyway, enough questions
bash$
no i didnt read the article.
-Dan
Patent 1: Click left button 3 times
Patent 2: Click left button 4 times
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Patent 11: Click middle button 3 times
Patent 12: Click middle button 4 times
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Patent 21: Click right button 3 times
Patent 22: Click right button 4 times
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Patent 31: Click left button and hold for 3 seconds
Patent 32: Click left button and hold for 6 seconds
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Patent 2500: Press return key hold for 3 seconds
Patent 2501: Click escape key and hold for 3 seconds
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"s/credit/money/;s/invetions/sitting on their ass/"
`which fortune`
All of you who are thinking this MS photo patent is "obvious". They aren't saying they are just showing photos in chronological order, for pete's sake. What the patent is for is FIGURING OUT when the photo was taken, either through the obvious means (date and time is stored in the image data info) or BY EXTRACTING IT FROM THE PHOTO ITSELF.
In other words, let's say you upload a dozen photos you scanned. The actual files would contain the data from when you scanned it. What MS's patent is doing is similar to OCR technology, finding the date stamp in the image itself.
Now obvious OCR (optical character recognition) is nothing new, but perhaps as applied to photo date/time extraction it may be a valid patent.
~RB
You guys are all idiots.
The patent is for the display of photos based on date/time THROUGH THE EXTRACTION OF THE DATE/TIME through non-obvious means.
In other words, alot of us take photos where the time is stamped right in the corner right? Well their patent is for software that figures out what the date/time in the image data is.
Make sense??
It's like OCR technology.
While I appreciate the sprit of your post, technically you are sorting pictures based on their modtime, a quantity unrelated to the picture format itself. MS is patenting organizing and displaying photos based on information (including time & gps position at the time of capture) stored in metadata within the file format. Thus their idea would mean that if you attached all your photos in an e-mail to your mom, she would still be able to access that internalized information, whereas when she typed ls -ltr she would have lost your filesystem dependant modtime information.
It's still god cursed stupid, mind you.
So for all you Slashdotters who cheered everytime some little crap company sued Microsoft over some patent that was questionable at best...it looks like paybacks going to be a bitch.
What inventions?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
"...Organizing and displaying photographs based on time,' which the USPTO published just hours before Gates spoke."
Uh, maybe I'm just not up to USPTO standards of intelligence but isn't a f**cking developed roll of film prior art here!?!?
Microsoft has never contributed a single notable innovation to any computer-related field.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
That's called a movie where I come from.
Anybody break the news to Thomas Edison??
I proposed this to the US Government in a proposal over 10 years ago with respect to an intelligence collection system.
from the article:
"We think--patent for patent--what we are doing is, if anything, more important than what others are doing." - BG
"Gates demonstrated several new technologies that the company's research unit is working on..."
This looks like a publicity campaign to associate Microsoft with inventiveness. Microsoft wants to establish, in the minds of the public, the notion that Bill Gates is the Thomas Edison of software. Apart from the obvious explanation, a marketing campaign, why might they do that? Maybe its a prelude to taking Linux distributors to court for patent violation. The conditioning of public opinion far ahead of the legal battle will help to insulate Microsoft from negative attitudes once the court battles begin. For one reason, however much the a patent dispute lowers their public approval, they would start out at higher place if they do this first. Second, people will tend to dismiss criticisms of these bogus Microsoft patents if they already have had fixed in their minds the idea that Microsoft is a factory for novel inventions. Microsoft is at work now tilting the field of public opinion before kickoff.
Bill Gates succeeds in business and that seems to owe partly to distant plannning horizons. For example, he seems willing to sustain XBox lossess for years in the hope of market domination further along "The Road Ahead." So IMHO its reasonable to suspect that here Microsoft is preening in advance of a legal battle which they plan to initiate later, perhaps years ahead. Of course, only time will tell if this suspicion is correct. That, or another leaked Halloween document.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
IBM collects so many patents because it makes about 400 million dollars a year going after people who may have infringed on them. How much would you cough up if a Deathstar full of IBM attornies showed up at your door?
This is what's behind the MS plan.
USA the land of freedom..... really this is true freedom....any a$$h0le can patent any damn thing... which comes out of his a$$ The USPTO has a bunch of useless fools... who accept all sort of patents.. Who invented software patents any way... the situation in USA is pathetic.. it should serve as a example to why software patents are evil.. ....let us get together...to fight Soft Patents in Europe.....
---Freedom to me, u and every other living being on Earth.
Apparently the troller trendsetters have decided that Stalin is hot and H*tl*r is not.
Wait... so is someone other than Microsoft getting credit for Clippy? And since when do they have more than one invention?
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is
I think that the long term problem that this might create is that other countries may quit recognizing our patents. I realize some countries don't, but this creates ammunition for the argument, that too many US patents are meaningless, so therefore should be ignored.
In a world economy we could find US industry and innovation choked up with this patent crap.
Even if somebody tried to do something about it, imagine how much the legal fees would be.
I'm really beginning to believe that MS plans to fight Open Source in the courts.
Adobe Photoshop Album organizes photos based on time, and moreover, the EXIF information in JPEGs makes that particular "invention" blatantly obvious.
They want me to be impressed by all the things I suddenly can't code because they could afford to spend thousands of dollars on government paperwork?
Well, congratulations, assholes!
Google recently acquired Picasa http://www.picasa.com/content/download.php?promo=h pp1
And one of the main features of Picasa is the ability to organize images by time and create timelines of images. See
http://www.picasa.com/content/learn_more.php? for mor info.
As an American I can attest that most cannot even define a patent. However, I don't believe it is much better in country X either. I have been to the Middle East, Europe, etc.
I believe the patent wars will be determined by the Judiciary versus the Legislative branch because, well...Your not suprised are you?
... and furthermore
Nothing new here. MS has never invented a single thing they just copied whatever anybody else had done and then marketted it. Sometimes it sold a lot better, often it didn't. (OS and Office sold well, phones/gameconsoles/tv's/movie software/soundcard (remember that MS originally did not support soundblaster out of the box the default soundcard in favor of their own offering?) flightsims and PDA's are kinda undecided along with games.)
But it certainly never invented anything in the old sense of the word. Sadly this is true for the computer as we use it as a whole. There are lots of hardware advances but the desktop we use has pretty much been "invented" by xerox and copied by everyone else.
Funny, xerox executives once owned the "idea" of the current pc. Where are they now?
But gates is nonetheless right, what they are doing, patenting bloody obvious ideas is indeed more important. Cause it don't matter shit if you got tons of prior art. If MS decides to fight you they got billions in the bank to pay an army of lawyers and you got nothing. Only and IBM or Sony can stand up to MS in such a battle. Scary eh? IBM the "bad guy" in the Apple 1985 ad now being the defender against patent suits against linux (on the basis that IBM has got so many patents everyone is infringing them, "Evil patenter: Linux is infringing my patent your honor! IBM: Your honor I got here a list of patents Evil patenter is infringing. Cue entry of dumptruck with list)
Oh well Bill Gates spouting crap. Stop giving press conferences and go tell your people to finish Windows-64, get a move on longhorn, fix the outstanding bugs in IE and just get a bloody move on.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have a patent from 1997 that Microsoft is in direct violation of! For the information of the slashdot community, excepts from the patent appear below.
...
A MECHANISM FOR PATENTING REALLY DUMBASS OBVIOUS SHIT RELATING TO SOFTWARE, AND SETTLING OUT OF COURT WITH SMALL BUSINESSES WHO HAVE BEEN DOING THE AFOREMENTIONED OBVIOUS SHIT ROUGHLY FOREVER
Claimed:
1. A mechanism for patenting obvious shit relating to software, the Internet, or ecommerce
2. A method for inserting buzzwords such as "over packet-switched TCP/IP," "using a client-server model," "using extensions to a standard HTTP server," "in a large-scale enterprise" and other buzzwords in said patents to make them seem less obvious and/or shitful.
3. A method for searching the web using search engines to locate small businesses who are already using said obvious shit
4. A method for settling out of court with said businesses, in the event that they are unable to pay for legal defense
as you can see microsoft is in clear violation, so I'll sue them.
If you had a patent on a guaranteed method for persuade Bill Gates to drop his drawers and let you fuck him up the ass with a jack hammer, you'd be the next Bill Gates.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
... the word is "grammar" ;)
Come now, I thought it was impossible to patent an existing idea (one that is already being used in someone elses technology)?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
First of all, patents don't mean innovation (sometimes they can mean theft of someone else ideas, sometimes they protect innovation and sometimes they are for foolish ideas). Microsoft is trying to patent all kinds of things, many of which are bogus patents.. I wish them luck in enforcing such silly patents...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
I'm tired of this...the link above IS NOT A U.S. PATENT...it is ONLY a patent APPLICATION that was published. EVERY APPLICATION IS PUBLISHED. When you apply for a job, does that mean you automatically get the job? NO! This patent application will be searched, re-searched, fought and argued until it is rejected. Get your facts straight before you post.
Simple.
You wanna change the world, you gotta do it yourself.
We have to challenge EVERY ONE OF THESE APPLICATIONS.
Not just the behemoth from Redmond, though. I mean all software patents.
The nice thing about the patent system is this whole public review period before some bureaucrat rubber-stamps and OKs it, and the ability to claim prior art afterwards.
It's a better to prevent a patent than to cancel one. Enough of us, who have the technical knowledge and some form of literary skill needed to educate the patent clerks, can prevent an request for a patent from hurling its way through.
[
I know that I don't speak out much anymore, but this was too friggin' important for me to stay silent (especially with my good-karma mouthpiece).
]
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
...method for killing via the launch of a projectile from a chamber, we still have a recourse.
i'm amazed people think this is hard to fix. 1. you cannot demand license for a patent unless you can demonstrate your invention working. 2. your patent application is not complete until you sell over 100 products based directly on this invention. his means you must have to have a significant, orginal idea that people are willing to buy on it's own without having the money extorted from them. i know people will moan about the having to sell something, but guess what chumps? this is whats wrong with these bullshit patents, they sell nothing just run around making threats.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Are they also going to patent the Windows OS as a virus, trojan, worm, problem magent?
'Organizing and displaying photographs based on time,'
Give me a break. Sort pictures by timestamp is fucking patentable? First clicking a mouse and now this? FUCK OFF!!!
Prior art:
1) Motion pictures. Time sequence of photos, right?
2) Every freaking file browser better than windows "crash test dummy" explorer.
3) Uncle bob in the basement with his box of old polaroids.
How much do I have to pay to scratch my nuts? Microsoft would have patented that too right? Or is it only if I scratch my nuts against against a PC when windows crashes yet again.
Bloody hell. You want to make money? Provide value! There's a novel idea. Perhaps I should patent it. Patent #23424234: "A method of making money by actually providing value to the customer".
While we're at it why don't they just cut out all this BULLSHIT about having to prove you're doing something new or different and have the patent offices around the world sell licenses to print money, instead?.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
and how many they will win ?
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Microsoft had several advantages.
1. An early and very beneficial agreement with IBM to use its version of DOS and pay it per liscense which greatly helped in establishing the company.
2. A wise decision on its part to work on PCs and sell its OS rather than going the way of Apple and trying to sell a package deal.
3. Bundling its software and leveraging its OS position, created partially by IBM, into other areas of software. In short, an excellent business tactic, but not a technical feat.
True, MS is at least adequate, technically. But it has grown and prospered based on excellent business and sales acumen rather than technical aptitiude. To phrase it another way, there is no mythical product which is so good or so cheap that it sells itself, though this is often how 'techs' see things and think others do too.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
It isn't just about ordering, it's about extracting the time for an image using a variety of methods including OCR. Novel it isn't, but it's a whole lot more than you've concluded after not even bothering to read it.
You couldn't just DOWNLOAD porn.
You had to bribe some homeless dude
to buy you a copy of Hustler from the 7-11.
It was either that or jack off to the lingerie section of the JC Penny catalog.
Those were your options!
From "When I Was A Kid".
Microsoft has not patented the wheel..
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
Oops, of course I meant /OD *.jpg
dir
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 120 chars)
Why not have the USPTO setup so the Patent Applicant foots the bill for the research costs of the Patent application
who cares what Microsoft wants?
We are a minority, as nearly all ' users ' ( by percentages ) run some sort of windows product at home, and especially at work..
Domination may not be 100%, but its close enough.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
$ ls -lt
WTF?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
21. A system according to clam 20, wherein the digitally-encoded time information comprises information recorded according to an EXIF standard.
so microsoft has a patent clam on fresh sea products?
Note it says re-assign
"Microsoft has filed with the Patent Office for a certificate of correction to re-assign the patent to Burchinal, the representative said."
The cost, directly paid to the patent office, is enormous for 3000 patents.
So if M$ file 2900 dummy patents, and say, look, take the cash, but let us have these 100, isn't that illegal?
I am not an operating systems developer, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be scared that in the future the only way I can enjoy technological advances of computing is by using M$ software.
Come on linux, we are all rooting for you, does linux have any patents? Maybe liek the cell phones giants, we all need some to share...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
... what else was happening that we missed in our haste to observe the chicken? Seriously, IBM is the bigger/older villain in this, but wait until enforcement starts. Makes good annual prospectus material, which means corporate greed, bonuses, and future revenue stream. We all started in 'puter stuff because it was cool and revolutionary ... but we sold out to the suits. Soon everything will be owned by Monsanto equivalents, and we will tend their fields.
How can you possibly patent the fact that photos are organized by date/timestamp?
Extending "Organizing and displaying photographs based on time" next week we could have:
-
Organizing and displaying photographs based on location
-
Organizing and displaying photographs based on colors
-
Organizing and displaying photographs based on shoe size
-
Organizing and displaying photographs based on legal staff
The possibilities of this new technology appear to be endlessMedia don't kill ideas, people do.
The person/organization that finds prior art should also be rewarded, say, by $500/patent from the pockets of the company holding the patent. Killing frivolous patents could become a nice way for competent kinds to earn some money.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The basic underlying message in your post was best described on BBC Hard Talk by Trevor Bayliss until the idiot presenting cut him off. Sometimes you just wish you had a button that could stab the presenter in the face... ANGRY!?!?!?!?
slashdot
i think the real problem with patents is that they were created as a system to protect an individuals idea.
then when companies were allowed to assume the rights of an individual via incorporation, they are then on par with competing against an individual.
if my rave is getting hard to follow, what i am getting at is that patents were manageable because at the time of their conception,
they were thought of as individuals would be submitting them to the government. the government would have vastly more resources than an individual right? so they could be able to handle the workload.
when corporations began to use the 1886 14th Amendment case in the U.S. Supreme Court about assuming the same rights as an individual, that opened the door to a situation where
1. the person being reviewed has a great many more resources than the reviewer.
2. the person being reviewed may have more influence than the reviewer.
3. the person being reviewed may be able to exhaust the reviewer.
How many of you who have replied to this topic, complained about it with good factual reasons, actually went out to the US patent office and did something about it? Go out and organize a rally. If you want to change something, just do it. Anyone want to give donations so can afford a lawyer when I get sued by nike?
Microsoft's Projects Hosted on SourceForge.net Hit High Note With Open Source Users
Thursday July 29, 4:00 pm ET
100,000 Downloads Reported for Microsoft's WiX Software in First 100 Days
FREMONT, CA--(MARKET WIRE)--Jul 29, 2004 -- SourceForge.net, an OSTG (a wholly-owned subsidiary of VA Software Corp., (NasdaqNM:LNUX - News) site, today released data reporting that the two Microsoft projects released under the company's "Shared Source Initiative" are in the top 5% of active projects hosted on SourceForge.net. SourceForge.net (www.sourceforge.net) is the collaborative development site founded to support and foster Open Source development projects, and currently hosts more than 80,000 projects on the site.
ADVERTISEMENT
Microsoft's two projects, WiX and WTL, represent the first time that the company has released projects on SourceForge.net. The Windows installer XML (WiX) software allows developers to build installation packages for Windows products was posted on SourceForge.net in April, and has received nearly 100,000 downloads in the first 100 days of its posting. The Windows Template Library (WTL), which allows developers to create graphic interfaces for Windows programs, is also in its third month of posting, and has received 19,000 downloads -- placing both projects in the top 5% of active projects on the site.
"We're not surprised to see this level of interest in the Microsoft projects," said Patrick McGovern, Director, SourceForge.net. "More than a quarter of the projects on SourceForge.net are Windows-related, and anything that makes developing for that platform easier is very attractive to our users. We're pleased that Microsoft has been testing the Open Source waters with an Open Source license on our site, and, judging by user response for the first three months, we look forward to hosting even more projects from Microsoft as they reach out to the Open Source community."
WiX and WTL represent different types of projects for Microsoft. While both are developer tools, WiX was initially developed for internal use at Microsoft and later became the first Shared Source project ever released to the community via SourceForge.net. WTL was available via the Microsoft Developer Network for 5 years before it was released on SourceForge.net. Both projects are available now under the Common Public License and allow interested communities of developers to work with the tools and to modify them if needed in order to fit custom needs.
"We chose to host the Shared Source WiX and WTL projects on SourceForge.net because it is home to a strong community of Windows developers and has a great tradition of collaborative development," said Jason Matusow, director of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative. "Through the WiX and WTL offerings, we are applying lessons learned over the past three years on the Shared Source Initiative and engaging more closely with the developer community. We are proud to have WiX and WTL represent our first Shared Source offerings on SourceForge.net."
Bill Gates has applied for a new patent, which he believes will insure the growth of Microsoft. a device made of carbon, and organic tissue, which is capable of extracting oxygen from a heterogenous gasious mixture; once the oxygen is extracted, it is sent through out the organic tissue to suppy the catalyst for oxidation
Translation: "This patent applies to eveything else not mentioned to this patent. We only disclosed this example at it's what the applicant supplied with their $check$"
My sis works at USPTO, I need to ask her what the heck are they smoking there...
BTW, briefly reading the link. Here's their source code:
// Begin Patent
ExImage i = EXIFStandardKnownAPI->getFile("pic.jpg");
Time_t t = i->getTimeByKnownAPI();
int indexPosition = getIndexByTimeSimpleSort(t);
// End Patent
processImageIntoFileSystem();
(Also, I guess my EXIF reader I implemented on PalmOS that does essentially the same thing is in violation!)
My rant!
Microsoft is the inventor of the personal computer. As a matter of fact they are probably the inventor of the computer. We just don't know and understand. Therfore all knowledge belongs to Microsoft. The United States has been unable to recognize this because the system tries to prevent the true rulers of all humanity to rise to their rightful place. Microsoft is forced to use the existing system to obtain their natural rights to all knowledged and eventually become the rightful place over all of humanity. None of the preceding aguments against Microsoft are of any value as they are inane and specious.
Nobody can steal code from them, but they can look at OSS and say "thats our idea."
.NET, Intellisense, and much much more.
This coming from the community who freely rips off taskbars, start menus, the integration of filesystem and browser,
Just saying. Pot calling kettle black. I don't really see any innovation in OSS either. At least Microsoft is starting over with Longhorn.
Two lines from the patent application:
Inventors: Sun, Yan-Feng; (Beijing, CN) ; Zhang, Lei; (Beijing, CN) ; Li, Mingjing; (Beijing, CN) ; Zhang, Hong-Jiang; (Beijing, CN)
Assignee Name and Adress: Microsoft Corporation
Is this how digital movies work? A series of photographs with a time stamp displayed quickly in sequence?
hmmm...Microsoft vs. MPAA...
What? MS is going to start inventing stuff for a change?
Once again the patent office is ignorant of prior art.
Cannon have the ZoomBrowser photo archive utility which they supply with their cameras, first (c) 1998. One of its features is a Time Tunnel mode, where you browse photos chronologically.
Yippee for MS innovation.
Everybody should file a patent. Just choose some half baked idea. Doesn't have to be technical (you can probably patent your steak marinade or cocktail recipe for all I know, there must be slashdotters who can tell us what is and isn't patentable). I have a patentable design for a broccoli steamer....
You don't need a lawyer, just look at existing filings and mimic them. Pretty much anything will be accepted. The whole system would be brought down by the weight of it's own absurdity.
...are a way of displaying pictures associated with time, the fact that someone will have to pay royalties to MS for things like these:
x .shtml
m ax_2001_sc_184.htm
:(
http://www.max.rcs.it/060cal/01don/0109/2601/inde
http://www.stefanotorre.it/megan_gale_calendario_
makes me sick
A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.