Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Bold Patent Move
theodp writes "On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that Microsoft has a patent pending for displaying numbers in a box to make them stand out. " Check out the images to see the power of this breakthrough patent. That's almost impossible to do without patents.
The sooner we patent the building blocks of life, the sooner we own life. This is the ownership society, so lets own stuff!
Slashdotting a US Gov't website? Some pent up anger people?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Highliting (or otherwise bringing attention to) data (numeric or otherwise) has been done since the old DOS days, and probably before. This certainly isn't new, and isn't unique by a stretch of the imagination.
Of course, by filing the patent, they want it to seem that Microsoft is the originator if this technique. If the rules the USPTO seems to apply to software patents were applied to 'real world' patents, you'd see the whole lot of them thrown out on their asses, and the whole office revised from the janitor on up to the chief.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
defensive patents are ridiculously stupid
No, because I (personally) can implement this in no fewer than 5 seperate programming languages, and literally thousands of different ways. This patent is bullshit. If they want to copyright their implementation of this, that's fine. But a patent? No.
For example, let's say I wrote a perl script that converted a text document to HTML. If I wrapped numbers and words believed to be numbers in bold tags, technically I'd be violating this patent.
It's pretty obvious, since MS started this patent craze after being sued over ridiculous overbroad patents, that they are just doing things like this to cover their butt. They've NEVER sued anyone over a patent. I highly doubt they ever will unless it's a blatent and public rebellion or something...
I mean the stuff that you can patent now is getting really ridiculous and you know who gets hurt? The small guy? Microsoft can make a million patents and then ride off the tithes from them, and an independant person will have to dodge through a mine field of patents to make a product.
I'm all for the Office of Patents, which was an idea to show who was the first with the idea, granted there's some flaws, (Bell is created with created the phone while there's a good amount of evidence where he's not the originator)
But the original idea was for people to get credit for their ideas, and be able to own them.
However The Corporate world we live in today, has made patenting a game almost. You can patent any abstract idea, and even if your version completely fails and you couldn't program for crap, you can sue anyone else who succeeds at your worthless attempt even if it takes them 10 years, because you own the patent?
I think we need to revise the patent system to at least show that head way is made or such and if the system never gets implemented, the patent is worthless.
They're only extending the search to include all numbers and words representing numbers. Essentially instead of searching for just one word, number, or collection of symbols, they're searching for a whole bunch at the same time and emphasizing the results.
Essentially we get a preprogrammed search to pick out anything that might represent numerical data. I'm certain that something similar to this has been done before in exactness or in a very similar manner. I don't know of many programs that currently support the ability to search as broadly as this (i.e. pick out nouns, verbs, numbers, Names, etc. rather than just one number, word, collection of symbols) especially in terms of word processors and the like. Why not just patent the idea to search and emphasise certain types of symbols (i.e. numbers, Names, places, whatever else) rather than just going after this more specialized case of numbers?
Of course this brings us to wonder, should such an idea outlined above even be patentable? I really don't care much at this point, but it would be a useful feature to see in word processors and other things like this in the future. It would probably be better if it weren't just in one word processor though.
You also have to consider the possible applications of this patent (and the people they can collect from) if Microsoft happens to be granted this in loose enough terms. I'm not blindly casting stones at The Man here, but this is the same company that has filed patent claims for the technology of pressing the 'Tab' key to navigate hyperlinks on a web page.
Microsoft isn't the only one guilty of this though. In the past few years, a lot of large (semi) monopolistic companies have gone on Intellectual Property acquisition sprees in attempt to collect royalties/settlements for patents and copyrights in a field that the USPTO had been far too unknowledgable of, previously. The courts are starting to get the USPTO and friends to play catch up after such debacles as some of the recent outlandish URL trademark rights lawsuits (i.e. Microsoft, Dell, etc.).
I just hope this blows over without any fuss.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
This is still funny?
Actually, you might not. According to the patent, one of the major features of the software is the ability to remove the highlighting.
OK, so what if I enclose all numbers in DIV tags, setting the class on each to "number"? That's something that you might well want to do (i.e. fairly bloody obvious), and then it's possible to toggle borders using one line of CSS. Come on, we have an entire style system devoted to handling this sort of change!
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Not at all, you'd just be formatting your own document. What's patented is a method for recognizing an instruction to highlight all numbers, finding all the numbers in the document, then somehow highlighting them. So unless your perl script for converting text to html also responded to a command to highlight all numbers, this patent would not apply. Then again, IANAL and certainly IANAPL.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
/[0-9]+/
"The system is screwed, you can't blame MS for using it."
Yes, you can.
They bought their way out of an antitrust conviction. If they don't like the patent system, bribe the same assholes to change it.
I don't see them doing that.
Trust me, Gates LOVES the patent system. It's his last defense against OSS and he's going to use it.
Eben Moglen pointedly targeted Microsoft's patent acquisition program Tuesday at his talk at LinuxWorld. He KNOWS Microsoft is going to do this, and the OSDL Patent Commons Project and other methods for fighting the patent system are being put in place to make sure "SCO doesn't happen again."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Microsoft files thousands of patents every year. They have their own patent examiners (!). Every patent is designed to be a land mine for anyone else trying to get in their face. This is probably not even close to the worst of all their patents, even if you only look at recent ones. So why pick on this particular one?
How about this then?
Marezy doats and dozey dotes an' liddle lamsy divey, a kiddly divey doo wooden shoe!
owa tagu siam.
These seem pretty simple to me. Whetehr or not it is simple and easy to read is subject to interpretation and opinion.
- The fact that the numeric data test can be
expressed as a regular expression implies
obviousness (and that expression having
been described by a slashdot
reader within the first fifteen minutes
of posting); and
- The fact that run-time (re-)configurable
highlighting has a long history (I point
to syntax highlighting in your favorite
programming editor; I know that at least
for nedit it can be turned on/off
by a click)
implies to me that this is a combination of obviousness and prior art, hence should not be patentable."My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Read the patent.
They're not patenting the method of highlighting, they're patenting the idea of providing a function to highlight all numerical data in a document.
It seems like a pretty weak idea for a patent to me, and I am against software patents personally, but this is far from the worst example of one that I've seen.
Microsoft has just announced they've patented Bullshit!
Not to defend MS but the problem isn't that they apply for these patents but that they can and that they have to.
Apple's case against MS defined the legal benchmark by which you could protect any new features in an OS and by extension, I think, in an application.
Companies, especially public companies, now know that the only way to defend themselves against litigation, especially in the US, is to establish patents covering features. Even if those patents are utterly bogus.
MS might also be in a position where they could be held legally responsible by their shareholders for not trying their upmost to defend the companies work via patents.
Its stupid that companies can get these sorts of non-trivial patents but don't complain about MS or other companies that do this. Complain about the legal precedents and the patent system that allows it.
Obvious doesn't matter here. Microsoft is trying to build up a portfolio of patents. The purpose of the portfolio is not really to protect intellectual property, but to give Microsoft's lawyers another weapon in any disputes with other companies.
But that's the definition of obviousness! Your not supposed to be able to patent ideas (no matter how clever) only implimentations. And the implimentations have to be non-obvious. That's what ticks us off so much about patents on stuff like this, it's a back-door way of patenting ideas- by pantenting the obvious solution to them!
Nothing is considered obvious anymore. After all, if it was THAT obvious, somebody would have patented it already. Yes, the US patent system is broken. The only disagreement possible is in exactly HOW it's broken. If you listen to patent lawyers, it's broken because the USPTO's fees go into the general budget. If you listen to patent victims, it's broken because mere thoughts are being patented. If you give me a problem, and I can solve it in my head using nothing more than pencil and paper as a scratchpad, that solution should not be patentable.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist