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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.
I'm usually pretty lenient about what I consider a good patent, but this one seems dumb. It's not even an optimal way to do it. They're just using a fairly cheesy form of compression to make a string shorter.
So, they remove the ability for a human to tell what the lat/long is by inspecting the string, but compress the string suboptimally? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
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What happened to not being able to patent a mathematical formula? Isn't something like this basically just a math trick?
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Although M$ churns out mundane but fairly good software as the main line of business, this company has a huge R&D budget, and the central research laboratory at M$ is the equivalent of the old Bell Laboratory. I suspect that the M$ laboratory is not confined to only software research. There is likely small, upstart efforts exploring other technologies.
Certainly, X-Box took me by surprise as, up to its debut, I had always thought of M$ as a software company.
May be, there is something to the warning: "Resistance [in any technology] is future. You will be assimilated."
Of course, if there were no software patents, then Microsoft wouldn't need to do this.
Nonsense.
You are correct in asserting that the USPTO makes money from issance - as per their fee schedule, they get $300 (plus extra fees for various things like multiple independent claims) when the app is filed, and $1,400 when it issues.
But the examiners - the people who make the allow-vs-reject decision - aren't responsible for the fiscal well-being of the USPTO. Were that the case, virtually every application would slide through to issuance with barely any examination. We'd be back to the patent registration scheme of the early 1800's, where you got a patent simply by filling out the right paperwork.
We don't have that system - in name or in practice. The examiners do a hell of a lot of rejecting, with backing references to other patents, journal articles, etc. They don't have the resources for an exhaustive search - but the typical application garners at least two separate rejections from the examiners.
But this is a classic catch-22 example: people often examiners for spending too much time on examination, and thereby contributing to the 2.5-year average pendency of patent applications.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Non-obvious? Novel? Look at uuencoding or base64 encoding, they use a very similar concept, but they are case-sensitive and include other symbols besides letters and digits.
Real life is overrated.
The correct URL's are: http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/documents/nac.asp and http://www.travelgis.com/geocode Sorry!
Okay - RSA encryption. This novel encryption method is the mathematical basis for most encrypted web browser communication. Without such a technique, most of e-commerce would be untenable - either the encryption mechanism would be prohibitively cumbersome, or it would be riddled with holes.
This algorithm wasn't created in the vacuum of academia. It was developed as a way of allowing easy, encrypted communication among businesses. Without a business incentive to develop it - i.e., if other companies had been permitted to just steal the technology after it was created - no one would have created it.
So what happened once it was patented? Did the company take on the Darth-Vader-esque visage that most Slashdotters imagine? No, it had the good business judgment to promote RSA across the board, and to reap a reasonable profit through licensing to big companies like Verisign. The industry didn't grind to a halt.
And what would have happened without a strong, business-savvy proponent of RSA? Internet technology in general is a hideous swamp of competing standards and compatibility issues. Ask any web developer how much time they spend on IE/Firefox/Netscape/Opera compatibility issues, or on Java version compatibility, or on security issues between or among various technologies and standards. It's insanity. The explosion of web development has occurred not because of these myriad and disparate technologies, in spite of them.
Yet, in the midst of this sea of chaos, encryption technology just magically seems to work - automatically, unobtrusively, without a security update every 25 seconds. That technology works. I assert that this is because we gave one company some breathing room to develop it.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
The RSA patent should never have been accepted, for many reasons (prior act, broad claims, plain mathematics, to name a few) , and i fail to understand your argument that the patent itself helped the industry.
You can read about the patent and its problems in this nice article in cyberlaw . I would like to add a few things though, regarding the industry reaction to the patent.
In '95 computers were already fast enough to handle secure-only communications, but the existence of this particular patent was a big problem for most of the new and small web companies (and users). And make no mistake, RSA really enforced this patent, they didn't play Mr. nice guy, if that is what you thought. So the majority of web sites, did not serve encrypted pages, the majority of emails are not encrypted (even today), and most of electronic devices have no such support.
To be fair, the patent did create a new market: a few companies selling "security" profited from this. RSA too. The industry as a whole didn't.
Internet naturally did not die from this patent (as the patent was not broad enough to cover non-secure communication as well) , but online security definetely took a major hit.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle