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

The USPTO is Moderately Broken

[Uruk]

People have a lot of theories for why bad patents are granted. In reality, it's a bunch of different problems combined. I've dealt with a few trademarks and I've been involved in some patent review talks. Here's my IANAL take on some of what's involved:

• The examining attorneys don't get it. They don't have sufficient people with sufficiently deep knowledge in any particular field, so what's obvious to the practitioner isn't necessarily obvious to the examining attorney.
• They don't know how to search for prior art. If you don't know that "a digital identifier associated with an individual user of digital (web-based resources) intended to act as an identifying mechanism" is commonly called a cookie, you might grant a patent related to that because you didn't know how to search for similar stuff.
• In some cases, examining attorneys are paid by the office action, or how many letters they send back and forth contesting a mark or patent. In some cases, this provides opportunities for applicants to add much more supporting information to the application, and get a feeling for the thinking of the USPTO and what they need to say in order to get around the USPTO's mental biases
• Lawyers have the time and money to browbeat and appeal USPTO decisions. USPTO doesn't have the time and the money to fight every one to the bitter end. The reality is that the only way to make some attorneys go away is to grant it.

There's a company out there called M-CAM that does IP valuation - in other words they can tell you if what you have is a bogus patent worth nothing that shouldn't have been granted, or if you've got something that is fundamentally innovative. I saw a presentation a while back from the guy who runs the company, and they really get it. (The presentation started off by likening bogus patents to counterfeit money, particularly since companies use these patents to inflate perceptions of their valuation when sold)

Re:Bull Hockey!

[Intron]

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.

Trivial

[mopslik]

The patent's about tagging the origin of an email address and altering the display of that email address based on the origin of the email address - if the email address came from the address book it looks one way if it comes from the internet it looks differently.

Trivial. Seriously.

"Check the address against all entries in the address book. If it's there, underline it. If it's not, italicize it."

I'm not aware of prior art in this one - do you know of an email client that visually differentiated between internet based email addresses and ones from the address book?

Remember, kids: just because you do something first, doesn't mean that it deserves a patent.