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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.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
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.
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.
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
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"!!!
"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!
- 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!"
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