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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.
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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.
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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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.
"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.
Of course, if there were no software patents, then Microsoft wouldn't need to do this.
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
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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.
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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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!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The correct URL's are: http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/documents/nac.asp and http://www.travelgis.com/geocode Sorry!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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