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Why Bill Gates Wants 3,000 New Patents
theodp writes "The NY Times looks at Microsoft's newly acquired passion for patents and wonders: What would Thomas Jefferson think if he were around to visit Microsoft's campus, seeing software patents stacked like pyramids of cannonballs? Jefferson might also be shocked by Microsoft's summer crop of patent apps, which includes Creating a note related to a phone call, Adding and removing white space from a document and Identifying when baseball is exciting. Gotta meet that quota of 60 fresh, nonobvious patentable ideas a week!"
Gotta meet that quota of 60 fresh, nonobvious patentable ideas a week!
The article submitter says this like it's some newfangled scheme freshly dreampt up by big bad Bill. It isn't. Around 100 years ago when Thomas Edison ran his lab it was a patent mill; hired inventors had to submit a weekly quota of patent applications.
I forgot to add: kerning and leading and tracking all are very useful in removing whitespace. Are these now infringements?
Software patents are tame and fairly meaningless in the out-of-control state that Patent Law is in; when GE won a patent in Appeals to the ownership of a bacteria that they "engineered" to eat oil, the Patent Office stated, "Everything save a full term human being is patentable." Since then almost 5% of the human genome has been patented by various biotech firms, under the basis of medical trade secrets and pharmaceuticals treatment. I'm not making this stuff up, The Corporation is a good non-technical learning start.
Well, there's certainly prior art for not reading
the article. The patent for whitespace insertion
is actually for adding more information to an
electronic page, without cause the page's content
to be pushed down or spill over into another
page. This is not a trivial thing to do.
If you disagree that this is trivial to do, then
why do all my editors (open and closed source)
fail to currently offer this option?
patents are one of the reasons why Microsoft has a monopoly
That's absolute Bull Shit. Microsoft's monopoly was gained by using its market share in the OS for PCs area (1) to make its own applications more accessible to customers over other vendors, and (2) to make hardware vendors favor selling its own aplications over their competitors'. See Wikipedia or any other site discussing Microsoft's monopoly.
Micorosoft NEVER used patents to gain any part of its monopoly. In fact, it obtained its monopoly way before software patents were even commonplace.
"The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of fourteen years; but the benefit of even limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:98
... It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors.
"Inventions... cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody... The exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:334
"The following [addition to the Bill of Rights] would have pleased me:... Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature and their own inventions in the arts for a term not exceeding __ years, but for no longer term and for no other purpose." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:451, Papers 15:368
"In the arts, and especially in the mechanical arts, many ingenious improvements are made in consequence of the patent-right giving exclusive use of them for fourteen years." --Thomas Jefferson to M. Pictet, 1803. ME 10:356
"Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual; for to embarrass society with monopolies for every utensil existing, and in all the details of life, would be more injurious to them than had the supposed inventors never existed; because the natural understanding of its members would have suggested the same things or others as good. How long the term should be is the difficult question. Our legislators have copied the English estimate of the term, perhaps without sufficiently considering how much longer, in a country so much more sparsely settled, it takes for an invention to become known and used to an extent profitable to the inventor. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement." --Thomas Jefferson to Oliver Evans, 1807. ME 11:201
"No sentiment is more acknowledged in the family of Agriculturists than that the few who can afford it should incur the risk and expense of all new improvements, and give the benefit freely to the many of more restricted circumstances." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1810. ME 12:389
http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jef f1320.htm
It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the pos
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Ah, the emergence of a troll to toss accusations of "Communist" my way.
I was expecting it in the first reply, actually. You've left me dissapointed. I doubt Communists would be terribly appreciative of me explicitly advocating a market economy as I did, so you've made a bigger fool out of yourself than your intellect can probably comprehend.
My claim that business practices should not defeat the march of innovation, nor should they infringe on the rights of an individual are rather basic principles that you will find held by a great number of people from vastly different ideological perspectives from left to right.
A difference I see between IBM and Microsoft, is that Big Blue seems to have at least done some truly innovative cutting edge stuff, I've yet to see something from Microsoft that makes me go "yeah that's realy impressive they came up with that". Some IBM researchers have actually received Nobel prizes, I've yet to see a Microsoft employee do that.
From http://www.research.ibm.com/know/top.html
- Copper Chip Technology
- Giant Magnetoresistive Head (GMR)
- Speech recognition technology
- Scalable parallel systems
- Token-ring networking
- High-temperature superconductivity (1987 Nobel prize)
- Fractals (Mandelbrot)
- Thin-film magnetic recording heads
- Scanning Tunneling Microscope (1986 Nobel prize)
- Formula Translation System (FORTRAN)
- Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) architecture
- Relational database
- Magnetic disk storage
- One-transistor dynamic RAM (DRAM)
Disclaimer: 1) I am in no way affiliated with IBM, and know they abused their monopoly in the '80 too. I just think it's ridiculous to compare IBM and MS R&D results, just name 1 significant MS innovation.
2) I'm no big fan of software pattents in general, at least in their current form, because checking 20,000,000,000 pattents each time a program a line of code is impractical.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
took me five seconds to find this yes, you are right, MS never actually had to go to court... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualDub
Baseball? Oh, yeah. We call that "rounders" over here in the UK, and it's a game only little girls play :)
"Brass monkey"
Urban legend. Many phrases like that are.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.