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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 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.
The coolest voice ever.
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
> 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.
Whoa, wait a minute. I agree it's useful (though the reason for choosing base 30 is indeed funny).
It is *not* novel or non-obvious. Anyone who has ever seen various forms of primitive compression, as well as most people with common sense, could easily have come up with this.
Patents are meant for the kind of really intelligent stuff that requires hard research work. This is not such an idea.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.