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More Microsoft Patents
An anonymous reader writes "One of the editors of LinuxWorld Magazine has an entry in his blog detailing more patents that Microsoft recently acquired. No, this isn't a rehash of the sudo patent. The new patents include one that seems to patent the use of the keyboard to navigate a web page! See the article here."
This patent was filed 7 years ago. They use IE 3 as a reference.
"A user may discover and navigate among hyperlinks through the use of a keyboard. For example, a user may press a tab key to discover and navigate to a first hyperlink that is part of a hypertext document."
Replace the tab key with the cursor keys and you've got the Lynx browser. Jeez, what a pile of nonsense.
Hopefully Microsoft will single-handedly make a mockery of the patent system (more specifically software patents) which will force the system to be reviewed sooner, and maybe some positive changes can come to it. On the other hand it's going to be tough in the meantime for the small developer to be caught up in small web page navigation patents and such in court.
There have been some silly patents covered here on slashdot, but these have got to be some of the silliest. What's next, a patent on the wheel?
Microsoft is filing all these patents recently is that they see themselves losing market share to Linux. They want to keep their profitability (stock) high by licensing/litigation revenue. I see it as a sign of *cough* (the year of Linux on the desktop) *cough*! Maybe that is a little ambitious, but I think MS is affraid!
Filed: March 6, 1997
On the contrary: Perhaps funding is the issue. If they make money for every patent filed, there's no incentive for them to throw out or even discourage bogus patents.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: We need a statute of limitation on patent infringement suits! They already do this in China!
One of the major problem with patents (in my mind) is the fact that patent holders are permitted to sit on their patents and do nothing, even when they are aware of infringing acts. Then, 10 years down the road, they spring out of nowhere with the infringement suit. This is what Unisys did with GIFs. Unisys allowed the web to become addicted to GIFs, without filing any suits. No, no... they bided their time! Wait until everyone is dependent on GIFs, THEN spring the trap; that's the key! I find this behavior to be underhanded and repugnant. UNISYS HAD TO KNOW! As if they were not aware that GIF was the image format of choice on the web. It's impossible.
An infringement statute of limitation would prevent possible future evils, too. For example, how long has Microsoft known about SAMBA, and not done anything about it? Might they not enforce their IP at some point in the future, when Linux is finally becoming accepted on the desktop? To kill SAMBA at that point would severely cripple Linux desktop adpotion. A statute of limitations would prevent this.
I'd even go so far as to suggest that a similar statute of limitation be applied to copyright violation suits. If a copyright holder IS AWARE of an IP violation, then they must file suit within a specified amount of time (2 years?), or lose the right to do so, in that instance. It's easy to see how this would benefit society: SCO.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Now there is a company that is an example of what a technology company should be today. They are not trying to imitate anyone but are innovating constantly.
I mean just image how great it will be when those innovations are actually implemented and we can use them. Simply run a program as an other user, I mean, wow, just think of the possibilities.
Or simply navigating a browser with the tab key, can it get any better?
And in case you missed it, you can't only navigate with the tab key, it will also be visually indicated where in the hypertext document you are. I mean, talk about brilliance. They simply think about every little detail! whoa!
I just can't wait to see these new features on my desktop.
I love this company!!!!!!1111!!oneone!!1
No. It ends when US IP Law gets to silly that innovation is completely stifled in this country. At that point, real innovation will have moved overseas, and the USPTO will be irrelevant.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I think the problem is not that they don't have a dedicated group of industry experts -- it's that they don't have *enough* people to handle the huge deluge of patents.
I think that another problem with this, too, is that patent disputes are often handled "incorrectly". Instead of disputing patent infringement through courts, I think that all patent-related disputes should be settled through a special (out-of-court) mediation system run by the patent office.
Perhaps I would suggest a system with 3 mediators per "settlement session" -- 2 who are highly-trained, skilled individuals with specific experience in the area of the patent dispute, and perhaps 1 who has some formal judicial experience.
Their jobs would basically consist, on a daily basis, of hearing patent-related complaints. Part of this effort could be funded through fees collected as a result of patent submission. (Hence, to fund this, I recommend that patent application fees be raised by some nominal amount.) That way, even "little guys" can go to this settlement session without having to have legal representation (and having to pay the large fees associated with them).
Of course, there are many other things that would have to be considered in order to implement such a system, but you get the point. I suspect that this "forced arbitrage" would render the patent system a bit "leaner" and less worrisome for the "little guy" who might be threatend by large, enormous patent-wielding multinationals.
No - it will end once they put legislation into place to also punish abuse of patent laws.
(e.g. introduce a blocking period for a company/holding if they introduce an abusive patent; e.g. a patent that clearly violates obviousness restrictions, or patents that have lots of prior art, like the TAB-links patent seems to have; if a company were denied even filing additional patents for a year of so after trying patent abuse, it would definitely put more pressure on the companies to only submit sensible patents; because otherwise they might forfeit the possibility to patent something that might really warrant a patent).
I'd argue that extending the block period to two years (more damaging to the false filers), as well as extending it to all daughter companies would be more effective. Personally I'd like to see a more vendictive clause put in: you file a false patent and three of your existing patents will be placed in the public domain. I don't see that happening, but I'll bet that'd stop this crap cold.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
- a computing device, a display, some key-input device, an algorithm to discover all hyperlinks in an html document;
- a) a way to display to the html document on the display;
- b) a way to organise the links into a sequence in a list based on their disposition in the document (e.g. add them to a linked list as you encounter them), with the location of the next hyperlink (pointers!) and the description of the type of the next hyper link (typ: hyperlink_type_t);
- c) when a predefined key is pressed, shift focus to the next hyperlink.
Apart from that you have to keep track in your url list of the types of the links (regardless of the classification you use), all it does cover is indeed plain and pure going from one link to the next by pressing a key.Donate free food here
I'm planning to write my congressman about the problem. He was pretty responsive the last time I wrote about another issue. Does anyone have a pointer to accurate sources I can refer to in my letter?
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Move along. It's just Yet Another Topic Where Submitter Did Not Actually Read The Patent Application.
It doesn't patent "the use of a keyboard to navigate a web page." What it patents is, as far as I can tell, the use of the tab key to navigate to and to place a non-rectangular highlight over a weblink, or to place any-shaped highlight over an imagemap.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
What do the major American CEOs care? They're moving it overseas anyway! Maybe that's what they want. They don't even have to worry if it costs them a few hundred million USD every now and then, they're still richer than the whole rest of the world combined(possibly an exaggeration, but maybe not...).
I predict that only until the U.S. itself becomes irrelevant, economically, nothing here will change.
Paranoid raving? Justified cynicism? Entirely right? I don't know...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Maybe this is a good thing. If some of these ridiculous patents try to be enforced by Microsoft, they'll meet with some stiff legal competition. GNU/Linux and OSS in general has a lot more more behind it than most people realize. Attacks of this nature will fail just like all other under-handed attacks have failed. The blessing comes as people realize how silly patents are becoming. Then we'll hopefully see some strong patent reform, or just a removal of the agency all together.
IBM WebExplorer... It was fully keyboard navigable - used the Tab key and all the hyperlinks were also made available in the Links pull down menu.
IIRC, WebEx predated any MSFT browser. Unfortunately, only available for OS/2.
But it was excellent at rendering pages before they had completed loading... even giant HTML tables can be rendered before all the html was loaded.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
Please visit a previous thread to see what kind of a moron our Patent Office has become:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/04/1825 22 7&tid=154&tid=1
We know that U.S Patent Office is notorious of issuing patents (particularly software patents) that are clearly unpatentable. But very few are aware that U.S. Patent Office is violating our constitutional right by promulgating and enforcing a Microsoft-IE-only policy.
This little-noticed law really makes me mad and feel like crying--why a government agency can be so stupid.
Basically, when you file a patent application, if the Patent Office thinks that your invention is not patentable because it is not novel or nonobvious, it will send you copies of prior art patents so you can rebut their rejection.
Now the Patent Office has changed its policy and will not send you those hard copies. Instead, it requires you to download those prior art reference on-line.
Under ordinary circumstances, this would not pose any problem, except that we are dealing with one of the most stupid government agencies in the history of mankind. The United States Patent Office, without much notice, now requires that, in order to download those references, you must register with the Patent Office, then the Patent Office will install a program ON YOUR MACHINE WHICH MUST BE RUNNING MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER UNDER MICROSOFT WINDOWS to allow you to communicate with the Patent Office before you can download those prior art patents that our government must furnish you as a matter of our constitution right and as part of the filing fees paid to the Patent Office.
Thus, basically it has boiled down to this stupid law: if you want to receive a patent, you are now REQUIRED BY LAW to have a machine with Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer in your office.
In other words, in order to exercise your constitutional rights, you must have a machine that runs Microsoft Windows and you must set Microsoft Internet Explorer as your default browser.
What kind of stupid government agency is this? I know many banks used to have the same requirement (i.e., using Microsoft IE running in Microsoft Windows), but they have got rid of this stupid policy because they have to compete in order to survive.
The United States Patent and Trademark can implement and insist such a stupid policy because it doesn't have to compete. But what about those 4000+ patent attorneys? How come all of them are so quiet? Are all of them idiots?
Even our HomeLand Security Department has changed its Microsoft-only policy. It appears that our Patent and Trademark Office is the only government agency in the whole world that requires its users to use Microsoft Windows. Unlike Homeland Security Department, the U.S. Patent Office has to account to no one!
Microsoft survives and propers exactly because our government agencies are unafraid to abuse their power and unashamed of being idiots.
and
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=120633&thres ho ld=0&commentsort=0&tid=154&tid=1&mode=thread&pid=1 0160890#10163299
Article I, section 8, of the Constitutuion specifically provides that: "Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Congress has the power to determine what can or cannot be patented (e.g., mathematical formulas cannot be patented, but mathematical formulas reduced to software code can, etc.)
Congress also vests in administrative agencies, e.g., the Patent Office, certain rule-making powers. Those rules, once promulgated, are equivalent to "laws", though they are much easier to be challenged in court. In order to exercise those rule-making powers, the agencies must follow certain well-defined procedure (e.g., publishing Official Gazette as Federal Register), AND
Here's a thought...
Perhaps there could be a law where any company whose patents have more than X amount of prior art then receives an audit of all its patents. Any with Y percent of junk patents are barred from registering patents for Z years.
Of course, any junk patents that are discovered in the Audit are placed in the Public Domain.
The Penguin Producer
I think the problem is not that they don't have a dedicated group of industry experts -- it's that they don't have *enough* people to handle the huge deluge of patents.
Call it what it really is.
Patent Spamming
Throw enough crap at the USPTO, and they're bound to approve some of it.
Either we need to shut down the USPTO, or amend the process so that those who submit fraudulant claims can receive criminal penalties, not just the obviously ineffective civil recourse.
Consider if you went down to city hall and filed paperwork transferring ownership of several dozen properties into your name, as well as the city park and other "public commons" properties. You then went out and notified the legitimate owners of the properties you just stole that they either pay rent to you or you're evicting them.
In this scenario, you're going to jail. But when Microsoft fraudulantly claims ownership to other persons property and public commons property, their only risk is having the paperwork undone and the application expense wasted.
It's time to pursue criminal penalties. Balmer's obviously perpetrating fraud and theft. Let's see him spend time with Bernie Ebbers. And if our government doesn't see it this way, then they should not be surprised when we come and close down the USPTO and other enablers of this crime. Certainly they know they're accessories to this crime by now? Either fix the problem folks, or we're going to lump you in with the other white collar criminals.
Once again, patent critics fail to know what they're talking about. The blogger got lucky -- he is probably right on the first patent being BS, though I'm a lot less sure about the second.
When you are determining whether a patent is sane, the abstract content *does not matter*. That's just a tool to help you find a patent you're looking for. Same goes for the title. If you are saying "this patent has prior art", you should never, never, ever even *mention* the contents of the title or the abstract. They don't have legal force.
The thing to look at are the *claims*. The patent covers anything that uses one ore more of the listed claims (these are numbered). Each claim has to be invalidated on its own, so you can invalidate a bunch of claims and not invalidate the whole patent. If there are multiple sections to a claim (these are lettered), then *all* of the sections must apply to a device,system, or whatever before it is infringing.
So if you want to say "this patent has a claim that's bullshit", you need to cite an *entire claim*, including all the subsections of that claim, and show how those subsections already applied to an existing system *before* the claimed date of invention (there's another point; the date the patent is *issued* doesn't mean much). Furthermore, unless every claim is invalid, the patent still has strength on the valid claims.
I don't like Microsoft. I really don't like software patents. But claiming that Microsoft is coming up with bullshit patents based on totally ridiculous grounds doesn't do anyone any good -- it just spreads misinformation among the group of people that could be criticizing Microsoft for one of many legitimate reasons.
May we never see th
There is such a thing as the Separation of Powers, and the President (Bush) has no power to dictate what the Judicial Branch does.
The grandparent said that Bush's Justice Department dropped the suit against Microsoft. The Justice department is not part of the Judiciary, it answers the the Attourney General of the United States of America. The grandparent is in fact correct that the Justice department under Bush caved on the Anti-trust suit. Whether Bush had anything to do with it is another question.
Why?