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Microsoft Seeks Latitude/Longitude Patent
theodp writes "Q. What does Microsoft feel is unpatentable? A. Apparently nothing! On Thursday, the USPTO published Microsoft's patent application for the Compact text encoding of latitude/longitude coordinates, in which the software giant explains how a floating-point number can also be represented as a less-precise integer that's displayed in base-30 notation!" If ever I have seen a silly patent, this is it.
Harrison definatly gets the royalties on longitude.
I know it's in your blood to hate Microsoft, but least take the time to read the patent! What they are seeking to patent is a METHOD of encoding LAT/LONG in a URL in a better way than is currently employed. I think this patent is incredibly valid.
A blog like any other.
"For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have gone from nothing to second place in the game console market rather quickly"
Unless you qualify this rather severely, this is incorrect. As in "not even close".
On the other hand, I don't think you MS fanboi's are as annoying as Apple fanboi's, so that's at least a tiny thing in your favor...
The headline is misleading, becuase they are not patenting lat/lon, just one method of representing it in a URL.
I do think there are a number of holes in it. For example, claiming a patent on the method of concatenating 2 strings together just because they generated those strings creatively to represent coordinates.
Wrapping up, I think the patent is valid, but is a mix of patentable and non-patentable statements. It is at least an interesting algorithm to study.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
It just makes it shorter to represent numbers. 11111111 in binary is 255 in decimal which is FF in Hex. Representing large integers in base 30 allows them to appear shorter in URLs, using standard character like 0-9 a-z. Pretty smart idea, but I don't know if it's really worth a patent.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Ham Radio has been doing this sort of thing for years. There are several different coding schemes but the one that seems to have won out is the "Maidenhead Locator". I live in a 3x2 Km area in West Sussex, England which is located by IO90PW. I used to live in Norfolk, England located by JO02LQ.
This coding scheme has been around since the 1980's but there were others with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy before that.
This is not justification for a patent. I cite Atlantic Works vs Brady, 1882.
"It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith."
Latitude and Longitude are normally expressed as base sixty rationals, so changing to base thirty integers isn't particularly innovative. This would never win a court case strictly; however, Microsoft has the money to keep this in court all the way to the U.S. Supreme court, so it would take a large amount of money to contest.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
0392670 and 1416000, seven digits each. You concatenate them together in a base-N alphabet. So if in base ten you have 03926701416000, nothing gained except I would like to know what is at that digit of pi maybe but no real use regarding the patent.
You could use a websafe alphabet (like I use when encrypting form data between one page and the next, based on a public CPAN module.. encryptform or some such) or a little bigger alphabet that would be MIME or Base64.
From item 8 they are dropping accuracy in order to encode in less characters. Um. Well yes you can shorten numbers to lose accuracy. If you write the numbers using letters instead, like in base 16 or some substitution alphabet it may look like you are shortening a word but really it is just dropping decimal places. Microsoft claims they are unique at being able to go back and forth between string length and allowable error. They have a patented subroutine that you feed say a floating point latitude, number of characters to use, the number of characters in the alphabet (i.e. the base) and required accuracy, and it will spit back something like "KXW" maybe.
Likewise you can feed another patented subroutine "KXWCMY" and it will give you back something like "39.3N, 142E" (well higher res than that really, it doesn't seem that useful unless you are measuring GPS coords to the inch). Perhaps this is the code a mobile device will shout whenever it can triangulate its location from a few known wifi points. :)
Well I just skimmed the end of it but it seems this is for use when you really don't want to use all those decimal places (8 digits for meter resolution). Needless to say 32 bits is enough to handle it but it looks so *long*! So instead of just lopping off the last few digits, they want to compress it (okay so far) but then they tell the compression algorithm how compressed they want the string to be, how much they are willing to give up (I would think in decimal places but ultimately in meters I suppose).
They then talk about personal info managers and map display programs on pdas, and the bs starts to pile up real fast. They start talking about nonvolatile memory, video tape, scanners, joysticks, office environments, what have you.
There is mention of an URL (301) that 'contains a geographic parameter "mapcoord", which has a parameter value "ry7cx4tp95"'. There is some talk about users inputting information which sounds interesting, until you realize that in the end this is really a quintessential rot13 for the 21st century, written by a corporation that does not care if users cannot decipher the codes or tell how accurate it is at a glance, or find it on a globe or non-M$ map, that assumes every gps manufacturer will liscense the patent, who cares if you don't have alpha input on your keypad etc. Someone should tell them you could do it all in just a couple characters on a kanji-equipped Japanese phone. While it gets more seductive as you read more and more, it also hits you with a sledgehammer that you have to have a calculator with the patented subroutines built into it, just to understand what codes your are typing.. it can only ever be useful among a weenies who have been brainwashed to think in corporate speak and that is the problem with Microsoft and Windows. If they just published it for free openly most people would forget it (it seems neat maybe but in the end it's just too much trouble unless it is an accepted standard like geo8 for an 8 letter string.. and even then). As it is I think it is utterly disgusting. Also it is probably beaten by error checking code, lossy image compression code, and the CPAN module I mentioned. Yuck!
I suspect the real reason for this is so they can control/prevent deep linking into their Terraserver (etc) geographical systems. If my website has a way of generating their coordinate URLs and linking directly to their content bypassing their front page, they could now prevent me from doing this because of this patent.
yeah that's why they provide a range of SOAP webservices , on the same site they tell you how it works and that its all public domain images...
Many users of TerraServer-USA have requested permission to use imagery from TerraServer-USA. All the data stored within Microsoft Terraserver is public domain, US Geological Survey data. Thus, users are welcome to include references to TerraServer-USA imagery in their own web pages. All that is asked is that an acknowledgement be placed next to the image referencing that it is a USGS image and that it comes from TerraServer-USA
so while its a dumb patent terraserver aint the reason, so go head and take what you want, enjoy
Note that there are claims (1, 8, and 16-21) that don't limit themselves to URLs.
Any software that uses such an encoding internally would violate this patent.
This co-ordinate encoding scheme sounds similar to one used by US (and other) military forces for air targeting.
See this description of GEOREF co-ordinates for example. Basically you divvy the world up in to a grid and use letters to reference the major fractions of the co-ordinates and numbers the minor fractions. So 106 25' 44" W 310 48' 06" N becomes EJPB 3448.
.sig?
In the language of intellectual property law, they opted to keep it as a trade secret. Fair enough. The downside to this is that suppressed inventions will usually be rediscovered, by someone who's not in the same position and who opts to take a different route. Patenting is one. Relegating it to the public domain is another.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Your logic is flawed. Yes, people will reinvent the technology. It doesn't imply that (a) they will do it nearly as soon as they would have, and (b) they will disclose it to the public.
If your schtick is promoting advancement of technology, then you should be railing against trade-secret law, not patents. Let's say there are two airplane manufacturers, each of which has spent $xx billion on R&D to produce airplanes, and each of which has kept its results as trade secrets under lock and key. Since none of this research is public, any new competitor will have to reinvent the wheel. Since no such company can get funding to do that, the industry remains gridlocked forever at two firms.
Thomas Jefferson correctly opined that patents are an embarrassment to the government. But he just as correctly stated that some inventions are worthy of such embarrassment. The patent system is a public contract: in exchange for the tyranny of a state-sponsored monopoly, the public gets free use of a disclosed technology. In theory, this only applies to inventions that meet the high standards of patentability. In practice, it's not quite so good - and everyone involved admits that the system needs improvement.
ALL IP law is detrimental to the advancement of the species.
That's an interesting assertion. The framers of the Constitution disagreed with you, of course - Article 1 explicitly acknowledges the need to reward inventors and authors. Also at odds with your statement are 200+ years of America's technological prominence, and the fact that virtually every nation on the planet has wholesale adopted America's IP policy. What evidence do you have supporting your position?
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.