USPTO Issues Email Address Patent to Microsoft

theodp writes "On Tuesday, Microsoft was granted U.S. patent no. 6,895,426 for treating electronic mail addresses as objects, which Microsoft notes allows email addresses to be easily added to a contact list, copied to the computer's clipboard, or double-clicked to open the related contact information for that email address sender. After the reaction to news of his first patent, betcha inventor Dan Crevier isn't too eager to let folks know about this one."

Comments

Re:My new patent:

[Anonymous Coward]

You insensitive clod, I was that kid!

In your face MS

[Timesprout]

EMailAddress timesprout = new EMailAddress("timesprout@gmail.com ");

while(1) {

timesprout.spamMSLikeFuck();

}

Women as objects

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, in light of this patent let me be the first to patent women as objects. ..

I kid. I kid.

Re:Women as objects

[maxwell demon]

Well, I'll probably patent whitespace. Thenifyoudon'twanttowritelikethis,you'llhavetopay.

Re:Women as objects

[aug24]

Could've been worse, you could have suggested they were only Interfaces...

Anyway, for most people here they are probably Abstract anyway.

J.

On the contrary...

[tezbobobo]

... we can now sue microsoft for all that lost productivity. Somehow they must be responsible if they own the patent which made me sift through herbal viagra for 40 minutes each day

First violation

[77Punker]

struct emailAddress
{
string name;
string location;
emailAddress()
{
name = defaultname;
location = default@example.com;
}
}

Re:My new patent:

[Uruk]

That means that all you suckers who use .sigs now owe me a dollar every time you post. You'll all be recieving bills very soon now.

That could seriously damage my .sig business! I've been in the business of selling high-quality signature files for quite some time now. I figure I may as well get my plug in:

This .sig is free shareware. Register now for only $49.95 to get its full 10MB version!

Re:Time to fight back

[donnyspi]

I wouldn't do that if I were you. I have already patented the process for sueing the USPTO for negligence. Sorry.

Re:Bull Hockey!

[PaxTech]

If you look at the article, the patent is on treating an email address as an object. This means that the patent office has opened the door to any "treat X as an object" patent. Essentially, they have just killed OO programming.

Luckily, it won't damage the porn industry, they have plenty of prior art on record for treating women like objects. But that scared me for a minute..

are they f***in serious

[b17bmbr]

holy crap. email addresses are strings. strings are objects in java. fill an arraylist or vector with strings. serialize it. bingo. object data. associate it with a particular action, open the application, and go. if that works, then here's my patent idea:

since this is just a combination of already established comptuer science methodolgies (object serialization, etc.) I propose the following:

1. user goes to mexican restaurant
2. user eats spicy burrito
3. user consumes spciy sauce
4. user drinks strong coffee afterwards
5. user takes huge shit

clearly the user serialized his data (i.e. the burrito), put it into a container (his stomach), then treated his data as an object by running it through drinking application (coffee) then running through another application (colon) and receiving final confirmation. toilet bowl full of shit.

so, who's with me?