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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???
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ----
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.
Microsoft patented France.
No, it's not. They're simply scanning the EXIF headers (that is, after all, one of the things EXIF headers are for), and sorting on one of the fields in the header. There are about forty fields in an EXIF header; I suppose they're applying for forty more patents, one each for sorting on each field.
That's Microsoft "innovation" for you.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
"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...
...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.
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.