Microsoft Patents The Broken y-Axis

theodp writes "Microsoft was granted a patent Tuesday for Displaying data containing outlying data items, covering the familiar concept of broken y-axis bar charts. Oddly, Microsoft's 2002 'invention' is described in detail in a 1999 listserv post and found its way into scientific journals and other sources before the patent's claims were disclosed. BTW, the patent's term was extended by 269 days, apparently the USPTO's way of apologizing for initially rejecting the patent."

Comments

Just a few notes

[Zaffle]

Its not patenting the idea of the broken Y axis, its a patent on an algorithm to automatically calculate where and how to break the y-axis on a graph. (Not as bad, but still bad).

The patent goes in to explicit detail on how the calculation is done, so you should be able to avoid it by simply doing something slightly differently. The "prior art" mentioned isn't applicable in this case, because the patent is on a particular method of doing this that is different to the prior art mentioned

This however doesn't mean the patent shouldn't be thrown out. Its the equivilant of patenting a sorting algorithm (eg bublesort).