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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/
Is it just me, or is the display of photos by time on a calendar exactly what Photoshop Album 1 did?
Hurrah for innovation!
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.
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.
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.
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.