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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."
Since we're on the subject, I thought this would be a good time to let all of you know that I have just patented the
^_^
Seriously, though, I think the exchange on Dan Crevier's blog regarding his last patent is pretty telling...he gets a barrage of posts criticizing him for stifling innovation, and instead of addressing them, he closes the thread. Yes, yes, I'm well aware it's his blog, and if he doesn't want to play, he' s well within his rights to close the thread...just like that kid who would always take his ball and go home when the game didn't go his way...remember that kid?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Hit them in the pocketbook. It's the only sort of censure a government office understands.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Apple would be just as bad if they were in Microsoft's position.
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:
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)
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
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.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
It has been shockingly revealed that the United States Patent Office has granted patent "31337d00d" to Apple. This patent guarantees Apple the rights to the idea of "A system of processes by which intellectual property may be applied for, accepted or rejected, in the form of patents". The only response from their press office is that they plan on suing the US Patent Office for its infringement, and backpay for the last century for lost revenue.
Ok, in light of this patent let me be the first to patent women as objects. ..
I kid. I kid.
... 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
Ok, fine. I hereby declare that I have patented everything that has not been patented yet.
I just gotta get my staff to write legalistic-sounding descriptions for everything (as if I had personally invented them), and get them over to the USPTO.
In the meantime, all of you please send me your mailing addresses so I can forward the royalty bills (I patented those, too).
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
struct emailAddress
{
string name;
string location;
emailAddress()
{
name = defaultname;
location = default@example.com;
}
}
After scanning the claims in the patent, I think this pretty much shows the USPTO has no technical capacity to judge software patents. While I would think of patenting broad categories inventions and even software if it were truly a unique invention, this is just beyond the pale. This is not unique, people have been doing it for years, etc. etc. How did these people get their jobs?
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
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..
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
(Score: -1, Troll)
You can't sue anyone unless the government gives you permission, cocknose. That 3rd branch of the government? Yeah that's the judiciary. Stop hiding behind FLAs and say it like it is - "I know nothing, ignore me, I should'nt have wasted your time making you read this crap."
God slashdot would be so much better if people only posted when they knew what the fuck they were on about.
What about judicial review?
Xenu loves you!
"Patents are a good defensive strategy for any company"
That's BS. Let's assume that a company admits the patent system is screwed, so it obtains patents for defense. That makes no sense unless it is also working to change the current patent system so defensive patents are NOT necessary.
Obviously because Microsoft is not working to fix the current system, it is using these patents for offensive means, not defensive means.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Re: software patents, there's a whole lot going wrong. More to the point, just about everyone knows it's wrong -- except for IP lawyers, for whom this is all a tremendous boon, and who will fight tooth-and-nail to keep the system that way. It's just a matter of:
1. Understanding why it's wrong;
2. Formulating a clear position;
3. Taking that position to your congressman;
4. Over and over and over.
Did you know that the USPTO has a public advisory board? Did you know that it's populated almost entirely by IP attorneys?
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/007may05/features/
Yeah, in the future, code won't be structured at all as a result of this patent! There'll be spaghetti code and god objects all over the place! *looks at own code* AAH, IT'S STARTED ALREADY!!
If the cat can't experience its own death, nothing will ever kill you. (No, really!)
I get at least 400 hits a month by somebody at the uspto. (biodiversity.georgetown.edu ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:38:43 -0400] "GET /tree/order/Homoptera HTTP/1.1" 404 339
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:38:44 -0400] "GET /tree/order/Homoptera HTTP/1.1" 404 339
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:38:46 -0400] "GET /tree/family/Cicadellidae HTTP/1.1" 404 343
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:38:46 -0400] "GET /tree/family/Cicadellidae HTTP/1.1" 404 343
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:38:47 -0400] "GET /tree/family/Cicadellidae HTTP/1.1" 404 343
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:38:52 -0400] "GET /images/counter/infosearch/leafhopper%20bug.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 363
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:38:52 -0400] "GET /images/counter/infosearch/leafhopper%20bug.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 363
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:38:55 -0400] "GET /images/counter/picture/leafhopper%20bug.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 360
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:38:55 -0400] "GET /images/counter/picture/leafhopper%20bug.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 360
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:38:59 -0400] "GET /images/counter/infosearch/leafhopper%20bug.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 363
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:39:02 -0400] "GET /tree/family/Cicadellidae HTTP/1.1" 404 343
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:39:04 -0400] "GET /images/counter/infosearch/leafhopper%20bug.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 363
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:39:06 -0400] "GET /images/counter/picture/leafhopper%20bug.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 360
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:39:09 -0400] "GET /images/counter/infosearch/leafhopper%20bug.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 363
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:39:11 -0400] "GET /tree/family/Cicadellidae HTTP/1.1" 404 343
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:39:13 -0400] "GET /images/counter/infosearch/planthopper%201.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 362
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:39:13 -0400] "GET /images/counter/infosearch/planthopper%201.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 362
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:39:14 -0400] "GET /images/counter/picture/planthopper%201.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 359
ptohidec.uspto.gov - - [21/Apr/2005:08:39:14 -0400] "GET /images/counter/picture/planthopper%201.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 359
Patents are written in legalese, not in english. Unless you are a patent lawyer, I don't think you can really judge them.
Patents are supposed to be written by practitioners for practitioners. If only lawyers can understand what a patent means, then the patent is a bad patent no matter what it covers (and it may also be invalid).
This is not a patent for autocomplete. It is much more specific.
Yes, it is more specific: it is autocompletion for Email addresses, which is a straightforward extension of autocompletion for everything else.
We did innovate in this space in MacOE.
No, they did not. The fact that they thought they innovated is just a testament to their ignorance.
You know what's even sader? It takes them almost five years to rubber stamp these things. The microsoft patent in question was filed October 17, 2000 and was approved May 17, 2005. You would think that with over four and a half years to research it that they would have at least stumbled on someone who could explain to them why this is stupid or at least shown them examples of prior art.
Is there any sort of public submittal process for showing that prior art exists against someone elses patent application? There should be some formal workflow with a public RFC period for any patent application. I understand why they would be hesistant to do this, as it could be potentially used as a fillibuster against someones application. Thats why I think it should be like all patents should be reviewed within 2 years and any public concerns should be formally submitted no later than 12 months into the process. If after that point no objections are raised and a silly patent slips through the cracks we revert to the current style of fighting.
Regardless of the mechanism used there needs to be some sort of public accountability for patent applications. I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to put some time into preventing frivilous patents from being approved.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
None of these are actually prior art for this patent, which is about a specific user interface for manipulating e-mail addresses. If you can find an application dating from at the latest mid-90s that showed e-mail addresses with an icon that varied according to the results of a database lookup to determine what kind of address it was, that is prior art.
The problem is that while this is an obvious idea, I think MS were actually the first to do it.
I'm patenting the process for treating a patent as an object. Everybody owes me money.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Hello000. Filed in 2000? Let's see, I think Lotus Notes did something similar. So did Groupwise. Eudora, Pine.
Come on.
If you look at the article, the patent is on treating an email address as an object.
And if you look at the patent, it's about a user interface that displays icons next to e-mail addresses to give extra information about them (having looked them up in your address book to find that information).
Absolutely.
Lotus CC:Mail in the late 90's did this, as did all of the early mail apps which had to contend with Internet vs. FIDOnet vs. etc... networks.
-David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
IANAL. The following does not constitute legal advice (if it did, you'd have to pay for it
The patent does not claim "treating an e-mail address as an object" except in the most incidental sense.
There are various parts to a patent: Abstract, References, Claims and Description. The Abstract gives a broad and often-misleading overview of the patent. The References give the references, and the Description gives a human-readable description of the invention. None of these have any legal force or meaning, except possibly as guidance with regard to how the claims might be interpreted.
The only part of a patent that has real legal teeth is the Claims. Unlike the Description, Claims are not human-readable.
Each claim is a single sentence, which is often broken into separate sub-clauses to give it a quasi-sentence structure. However, all the sub-clauses in a claim stand and fall together. That is, a claim to a process [X, Y and Z] does not cover a process only involving X and Y.
Claims may have conditional clauses, but they still stand and fall together. That is, a claim to a process [X, (one of P or Q) and Z] does not cover a process [X, Y and Z], because neither P nor Q is used.
Claims come in two forms: independent and dependent. The typical structure of the claims is:
1) A claim to everything.
2) A method/process/machine as described in claim 1 but specialized in some way.
3) Further dependent claims...
4) A method/process/machine as describe in claim 2 but further specialized in some way.
5) A claim to everything else.
6) A method/process/machine as describe in claim 5 but specialized in some way
7) etc...
That is, patents are typically written in claim groups, with each independent claim having a number of dependent claims following it. Dependent claims may be dependent on either an independent claim or another dependent claim, as shown above.
Independent claims are typcially made a broad as possible.
To read a patent you should first read the abstract, to get a vague sense of what the thing is about. Then skim the description and figures, but don't get too caught up in them because a lot of the stuff they describe will not be covered by the claims. The description usually deals with "the prefered embodiment", which is the best concrete example of the patented systems the author can come up with.
Reading the claims is the important thing. First, look for each set of claims. That is, find the independent claims and their dependents. Count the independent claims. This is a measure of how long you'll be at it. The thing that really matters to understanding the patent is the independent claims: the dependent claims are just specializations.
I prefer to read each independent claim out loud, very slowly. If one is particularly complex, I try re-writing it in human-readable form. After a few minutes of this it is usually possible to figure out what the general intent of an independent claim is. I then try to think of examples of systems that would and would not be covered by the claim, because the claim describes a boundary between covered and uncovered things.
Patents can be daunting to the uninitiated, but anyone who can navigate the complexities of C++ or Perl should be able to make a reasonable patent yield up its meaning without too much difficulty.
To return to the patent in question here, it has a single independent claim. It consists of 11 unconditional sub-clauses and 1 series of conditional sub-clauses with 6 options. So to violate this patent a system would have to perform all of the actions in those 11 sub-clauses and at least one of the actions in the conditional sub-clause. This includes actions like the following:
"upon establishing correspondence with said one or more servers, determining if the address corresponds to an address in a contact list of at least one server;"
Rea
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
Doesn't sound terribly innovative to me but can we at least be sure to criticize the right thing?
The USPTO didn't officially start granting software patents until 1996. As we all know, software patents were getting granted before that. The trick? Just claim a mthod for doing something that can be run on a computer. It's a smarter way to file anyway, because it prevents people from getting around a pure software patent by implementing something solely in hardware, or even manually.
As for doing away with all method patents, most patents have some method attached to them. Patent holders generally don't create that many new physical devices. (And most of those get design patents, not utility patents). Most of the new inventions are processes. The United States is no longer a manufacturing powerhouse, we don't make that many tangible goods, we create ideas. Doing away with method patents would also create a disincentive for people to improve how things are made. Got a cheaper way to make solar cells? If you can't patent the method, you just keep it secret. If it were patented, people could use the idea after 20 years, when the patent expires. With no patent, the idea may never get into the public domain.
since this is just a combination of already established comptuer science methodolgies (object serialization, etc.) I propose the following:
- user goes to mexican restaurant
- user eats spicy burrito
- user consumes spciy sauce
- user drinks strong coffee afterwards
- 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?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Well, I endorse the sentiment, but your view of business is not how business views itself.
First approximation:
Businesses aren't there to fix society's problems. They are there to make a buck for the stockholder.
Second approximation:
OK, that's not completely true: we as a society grant them incorporation and all its benefits because as a side effect they do solve a lot of society's problems. Hunger is not wiped out in the US, but all the hunger than can be wiped out by the profit motive is, which it turns out is a lot more than a 100% government driven system has ever been able to accomplish.
SO:
Corporations, from their own internal viewpoint, are machines that exist to generate profit. They do this in a framework of laws and regulations and norms that we as a society fix with an aim to maximizing the public good of their work.
If that framework incents them to damage the public good, then righteous indignation only takes us so far. Energy is better directed at reforming the framework. Unfortunately, this means politics, but there you have it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Did somebody at USPTO really read this, or have they begun to simply rubber-stamp "granted" on all applications?
Um. Where is innovation happening these days? More and more, it's moving to places where there is less respect for intellectual property laws, not to places where there is more. The U.S. is the bastion of IP protection. In ten years, it's quite possible that there will be no innovation going on here - we will have to move to other countries in order to work.
When you talk about where innovation happens, remember that most of the really amazing breakthroughs in computer science happened _before_ software patents were legalized. Have you ever read Knuth, or read old JACM issues from the sixties and seventies? Stuff like that would get patented now, and would never make it into a journal at all - the first we'd hear about it was when the owner of the patent sued someone who'd invented it independently.
You could argue, in fact, that since software patents were legalized, the software field has been fighting a losing battle to continue to innovate, and that slowly but surely, the we are being dragged under.
The idea is that there is some kind of great risk that if I come up with a cool idea, and implement a really nice application on top of it, I won't be able to make a profit because my competitors will just look at what I did and copy it. The reality, though, is that if you give me a patent, I won't bother to make my app cool - I'll just do the minimal thing I need to to exploit the patent, and then charge whatever the captive market will bear.
Result: hardly anyone will be able to afford my app, and those who can afford it will be getting a really crappy app, because I have no incentive to spend money making the app easy to use, reliable, et cetera - my customers are trapped, for longer than the forseeable life of my company, so why should I bother? The incentive system right now is ass-backwards.
actually in order to be promoted to GS-13 at the PTO you need to either pass the patent bar or pass the internal version of the exam
examiners usually start at grades gs5-9 (though you can start as an 11 with the proper background) pay is usually 50-65k to start, with a law degree you would likely start as a gs-7/9 (these grades require advanced degrees or 1-2 years of work experience to be appointed to). Promotion is rapid, you can go from gs-7 to GS-13 in 3.5 years and have about a 30k pay increase
there is no civil service exam requirement for the PTO.
the exam is no longer waived for examiners who had less than 4 years of service as of last summer, instead you need to recieve a certificate of legal competency (which requires passing the bar or passing the internal legal certification exam which is 50 questions from the bar exam) and certificate of bargaining authority
examiners do search online in computer based arts, i know, I am one. likewise an examiner can use an affidavit to estabish knowledge of a particular process they have personally used or seen and apply it as prior art. Only problem is it may not hold up if the applicant appeals it.
the japanese and european systems also dont work on a first to invent basis like the us, go check out some PCT searches some time and you will see what i mean, art indicated allowable in an international search will be rejected in the US simply because certain references can not be provided.
A law degree is not really necesscary as examiners dont argue case law very often.
Except Mail.app does this and has done so for some time - if the address is in your address book and that entry in the address book has a photo, it will put the photo in the top right of the e-mail window.
You could try and argue (I guess) that it's not an "Icon" but it looks pretty damn icon-sized to me.
Part of the reason why I switched to Libertarian is that republicans (and the democrats, but not as bad) allows the gov. to stomp all our rights and not have any responsibilities for them. If you sue, they will simply pass a law that says that you can not do it. Good Example of this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's not the issue. The issue is that when people who already have a lot of cash are given patents like this they can use them to threaten the competition regardless of the validity of the patent, because they can afford to take you to court and bankrupt you while you wait for the pathetic legal system to throw out their case. Which is not even a given since the judge will know squat about the issues or IT or basically anything else for that matter and will almost certainly decide the case on the basis of which lawyer s/he liked more.
MS don't apply for these sort of trivial patents in order to get money, they do it to prevent you from making money.
In short, if you don't think the patent system needs to be reformed, and drastically, then you don't understand the patent system (or you're one of the billionaires making money of the current mess).
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I don't know how you solve this problem more generically with the steady growth of doctrinare propertarianism in politics throughout the world, especially since property, to many, appears as "common sense", without the more sophisticated, economist's understanding of what property is, and means.
The battle to promote educated opinion is a difficult one indeed, requiring a honing of arguing skills so that the informed opinion can be presented as common sense over the prejudiced one.
I think, personally, that the root of the problem is deeper than patents.
Wikileaks, no DNS
It looks that what they are trying to patent is a mail address object that calls another server to see if the mail address is known.
So if, for example, you had a mail address object that did a call to your company LDAP server to implement a method isCompanyMailAddress() you might infringe on their patent.
It is a sad thing. Even though there might be no prior art published, this is obvious to a trained software developer. How else would you implement the isCompanyMailAddress() example above?
If you read the patent, it could be interpreted as something innovative, until you start looking at the examples of how it's meant to be used.
Correct. Now, I'd imagine that the innovation tagged by use of the phrase "...on the internet" will be replaced by "...as an object". What absurdity. What companies have started doing is disecting broad areas of knowledge/application, and staking claim to individual pieces. In this case, "...as an object" is exceedingly trivial to anyone even mildly familiar with object-oriented programming...ANYTHING can be an object. And to think that having an icon to denote some kind of state, or classification is something new or innovative....
Apple's been keeping e-mail addresses in objects, and letting you drag and drop them, etc, since the Address book application in 10.2. Other software developers were doing the same back in the NeXT days (Simson Garfinckel's SBook app springs to mind.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
My interpretation of the claims is that the patent is fairly narrow. It's broadest claim outlines a process consisting of many steps, all of which must be performed in order for the patent to be infringed.
You have to read the clauses of the claim as logical AND statements.
Mike Borella http://www.borella.net/mike
My comment, and I stand by it, was that CC:Mail did differentiate between email sourced from the Internet and email from internal systems, and showed that difference obviously. I was responding to a prior request for examples. One of the things my friend who used to be an examiner has told me is that it's often hard to find the places to begin looking because the patents end up covering tremendously specific cases, and then later on in court, the companies try to broaden them.
Then stop. I don't think too many people treat Slashdot as a source for informed legal opinion (and those who do are fools), but rather, one can get a sense of what people (specifically the geeks who read
-David
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!