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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.
Pretty sure the US Patent Office has a say in what is and isn't patentable.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
This is a problem with USPTO, not Microsoft. I mean, how is this any different from me downloading pirated movies? It's wrong, but I do it anyway because I can (get away with it). It's the same with Microsoft, they can patent pretty much everything because the problem lies with "the system". Fix the USPTO, fix the problem. Fix the distribution system for movies, fix the warez problem.
This only confirms what we have all known for a long time, Microsoft is run by a bunch of morons.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have done a pretty good job establishing and maintaining desktop and office suite dominance.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have made a pretty big warchest of cash.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have gone from nothing to second place in the game console market rather quickly.
For a "bunch of morons," in other words, they're pretty damned successful. The last thing you or anyone should be doing is writing them off.
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Of course it would win a court case. Why would someone convert latitude and longitude into base-30 integers with implied arbitrary precision? There's no reason to ever do that. Microsoft actually invented this one, because nobody else would want to. And they patented it to prevent interoperability. That's a problem. The patent itself, though, would stand up fine.
From the patent abstract:
"Methods are disclosed for encoding latitude/longitude coordinates within a URL in a relatively compact form. The method includes converting latitude and longitude coordinates from floating-point numbers to non-negative integers."
Where are tinyurl and similar websites to claim that they have been converting URLs to relatively-compact-form, using non-negative integers and letters?
"The set deliberately omits vowels to avoid the possibility of the algorithm inadvertently generating real words that could be offensive."
Wow, that is SO "politically correct". Still it does't prevent people from constructing URLs saying fvck 0ff. It would be better if people would simply learn to respect other peoples freedom of speech.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
This type of patent is NOT about protecting their rights to an innovation. It's about restricting interoperability.
After patenting this encoding method, they can create some kind of software interface based on it, e.g. have a web application that uses this encoding in it's URLs, or an extension to Internet Explorer that uses the encoding somehow. Then if the server/extension becomes popular, they can use the patent to lock out OSS and other vendor's applications.
Location-awareness is a hot topic these days -- that probably has something to do with this particular patent.
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.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
The point of encoding lat/lons this way is to allow a compact coding in URLs.
That's useful in mobile devices, where URLs are limited. It's also useful in that now you might be able to memorize and type in your latitude/longitude, since in a higher base (30 is just an example) you can get good precision in few digits (their example is 5 characters, with 2-meter precision).
Why base 30? That's 10 digits and 26 letters, minus 6 vowels "to avoid the possibility of the algorithm inadvertently generating real words that could be offensive". Funny.
So it's useful. As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel. Those are the three tests of a patent. If you don't want to use it, keep using base 10. If you do want to use it, at least give Microsoft credit for coming up with a reasonably clever idea. As another poster pointed out, this is the type of patent MS usually uses defensively, so that nobody goes out and patents an idea they're already using in live software.
I think MS would like to see everybody memorize the lat-lon of their home as two five-digit strings, but it's not going to happen. First of all, the patent requires you to pick a precision beforehand; decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds don't require that. Second, even if MS introduced a standard, they'd better release the patent for public use, or nobody will bother lest they risk being sued. Decimals are wordy, but everybody understands them and they're free.
I have one other gripe about the patent. They spend considerable time explaining how to convert a number in base 10 to a number in base N. It's not one of the claims, and it really could have been taken as given.
Well, it helps that the junk they're patenting has no actual value. I don't think Linux will be crippled by the inability to use an ISNOT operator in their BASIC compilers. :shakes head: Woodcock Washburn (the typically excellent law firm that drafted that patent application) should the hang its head in shame over that one.
I'm a patent attorney. More specifically, I'm a software patent attorney, and I truly believe that allowing patents for truly useful novel algorithms is a boon for the industry. But I feel that the quality of many software patents is an embarrassment to the field. Worse, it's an embarrassment to the patentee: it's a sign that they have no ability to evaluate the usefulness of their software - no talent to determine which pieces of their products are both new and critically important.
But the /. community should be glad about one thing: As long as Microsoft's choices of technologies to patent remain befuddled, it won't be able to tap the true, strong, monopoly-cementing power of software patents.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Just because no-one's ever done it before doesn't mean it isn't obvious - it usually means no-one's felt the need before. If you came to me and said "Paul, we need a compact way to represent latitude and longitude in URLs, what do you suggest?" this is exactly what I would have reeled off at my desk without even needing to pause for thought, modulo the rather silly thing about leaving out vowels. I'm sure the same is true of every programmer in my workplace.
MS aren't introducing a standard, quite the reverse - they are trying to prevent people interoperating with their servers.
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The inherent value in ISNOT is that Microsoft's Basic (the defacto standard used by the vast majority of Basic programmers) supports it. With this patent, other Basic implementations will be forbidden from supporting it. Only Microsoft will be able to produce Basic interpreters that are fully compatible with Microsoft's implementation.
Just like with browsers and web pages, most developers will casually use whatever features Microsoft gives them by default. Thus, it will not be possible for Linux to reliably run Basic code developed for Microsoft platforms without somebody going through the source to manually remove all ISNOTs. This barrier to entry into the market for the most popular RAD language environment in the business world can be extremely valuable to Microsoft, and it could effectively cripple Linux-based attempts to provide a competing platform for hosting business apps written in VB.
Actually, RSA is more of a counterexample than an example of your claim. Because the inventors published a paper describing their work before filing for a patent, they could only patent the algorithm in the US. (The US allows filing patent applications up to one year after publication; most foreign countries disallow any patent applications after publication.)
This had two basic results: (1) much of the development work in employing RSA for practical purposes, particularly in open-source software, was done overseas where there were no patent constraints; and (2) given the de facto availability of competing code, RSA had little choice but to be at least somewhat accommodating.
Of course, even so there were limitations: for example, RSA eventually made their own RSAREF implementation freely available for non-commercial use in the US, but at the same time forbade the use of more efficient foreign implementations in its place (a restriction that was often honored in the breach, I suspect).
The one positive aspect that I see of the patenting of RSA goes directly counter to your assertions: because of the perverse patent situation, developers of things like key-exchange protocols were forced to make their code more modular, since they had to be able to employ different encryption methods in different countries.
You must be unfamiliar with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 - in which the government encourages recipients of government funding to do exactly this. I don't believe that something the government encourages people do with government property can be construed as "theft."
(True, the RSA patent predates the Bayh-Dole Act, but there's no evidence of anything inappropriate in its patenting. You'll have to point to something particular in its history - and I don't believe any such backstory exists.)
It looks like you're relying on the general concept of patenting government-funded inventions. You must be unaware that the government has a hideous track record of commercializing its own technologies. Before the Bayh-Dole Act, the government retained ownership of vast and sundry technologies - which, as it happened, sat on a shelf completely unused. They had no commercial proponent, and so they were never used.
Your principle ignores the realities of business. Software is primarily a business - even the open-source kind. This is understandable; most Slashdotters know computers much better than business. Just be aware that virtually all of the software on your computer was written in a business context, and that the realities of commerce might play an important role.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
That's a relief (in this forum), though I'd encourage you to upgrade this to "often." Consider that you rarely hear about the software patents that are good and productive - they're not as newsworthy as "Amazon patents OneClick, oh no!"
It is certainly the case that making money is a major motivation for people (though not everyone)...
"Making money" has such a bad taste to it, doesn't it?
Money derived from commercial sofware doesn't go (100%) into the pockets of a greedy CEO. Much of it goes simply to pay the salaries of the programmers, and the operating costs of the business. I harbor the overly idealistic, probably naive view that professional programmers are motivated by (1) the desire to create cool sofware and (2) a deep-seated love of programming. They can only pursue those goals if they get a paycheck.
Sometimes, a patent is needed to secure the business capital to create this environment. That's where business realities, like patents, become important.
My concern is that in many cases software patents seem to have the opposite effect, as many people have argued.
I completely share your concern. Any time someone sucessfully patents an old or silly computing concept, it drags down everything.
But I attribute it to the infancy of the software patent field. People are still floundering with this new concept, what it can accomplish, how it should be used. Over time, sofware business people become more familiar with the nature of patents - and patent attorneys become more familiar with the nature of software. There will be a focusing of the field on truly useful and worthwhile software patents. Anything else - patenting ISNOT, for example - is simply a waste of everyone's time, money, and reputation.
That is, it isn't by any means the only kind of encryption available, so for many purposes one could avoid the patent by using a different encryption scheme.
Absolutely. In fact, the RSA patent encourages competing software companies to find alternative methods. Maybe those methods will be better - more secure, less computationally taxing, offering features not found in RSA, etc. - and they'll separately patent and commercialize their better algorithm. Encouraging competition and "designing-around" has always been a goal of the patent system.
It isn't clear to me whether there is a reasonable way to permit software patents in the cases in which they might be desirable and to exclude them in other cases.
Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's also pretty subjective, though. At least I can offer this: All patents - good and bad - expire 20 years after filing. That's an eternity in the software industry (though it's much less offensive than the copyright industry's "life of the author + 70-95 years" schtick), but at least it's a backstop time limit to really egregious conduct.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."