You Might Be a Microsoft Patent Infringer

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 13, 2004 @07:07AM from the the-easy-way dept.

theodp writes "Do you use drop-down menus, alphanumerical input boxes, check boxes, radio buttons or sliders to allow client side-processing of data? Utilize SQL, HTML, ActiveX, Java, Perl, JavaScript or JScript to do so? Employ arrays, stacks, queues, linked lists, or decision trees to organize things? Well Bunky, you might be infringing on Microsoft's new patent for Dynamically adjusting data values and enforcing valid combinations of the data in response to remote user input, which the USPTO granted Tuesday after 6+ years and two rejections."

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Prior art for claim 1 by Eric+Smith · 2004-10-13 07:49 · Score: 4, Informative

Digital Equipment Corporation (the remains of which are now part of HP) had an online customer ordering system in the early 1990s that did everything described in claim 1 of the patent. I'm pretty sure there were other systems in operation more than a year before the patent filing that did this as well.