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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???
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
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.)
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).
In the short term it's annoying but in the long term it's not that big a deal.
Are you insane? 15 years is a long, long time for computers. 15 years ago was 1989. That year, the 80486 was introduced. The web was two years off. Microsoft sales topped one billion dollars for the first time. The internet tops 100,000 hosts. IRC is introduced. Seymour Cray developed the Cray 3. MCI and Compuserve become the first corporations with email connections to the internet.
See what I'm getting at? A "limited" monopoly can be harmful, not just annoying. Even dangerous, when you are talking about the future of the most flexible tool known to man-- knowledge.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
> Patents are a joke, and they need reform.
You're right about this. Patents are a good idea, but leave it to big companies to fuck over whatever meaning they once had. Now I think it would be better for society (and specifically OSS people like me) to just do without them. Too bad for Apple if someone steals their (good) idea for spring loaded folders or the ipod's click wheel.
It's like driving while using a cell phone. A few people can't do it, so now everyone suffers (i.e. a few people died, now it's illegal). M$ can't play nice, so everyone loses their privleges. Sad state of affairs, really.
My other car is first.
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 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.
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.
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...