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Microsoft Wants More Credit for Inventions

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the without-microsoft-around-no-one-would-think-of-it dept.

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."

1 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. patently obvious by uncreativ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.