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.

Comments

Re:Well...

[dilute]

That's right. However, it is only an APPLICATION - it may not be granted, but you never know. It would be an infringement of this "patent" - if it ever issues - to perform the claimed "method" by hand - manually bolding (say) all the numbers in a document. In fact, this process is perfomed in the usual process of writing a patent application - by convention, in a patent application, all of the numeric references to the drawings are put in bold face. So, someone revising a draft patent application so as to bold all of the figure references would infringe this patent (assuming there were no other numbers in the document, which is quite possible). Absurd.

Prior art: Symbolics Genera & CLIM

[NetSettler]

Symbolics Genera (a descendant of the MIT Lisp

Machines)used something called "Dynamic Windows" which was later further developed as CLIM (the "Common Lisp Interface Manager"). Among the various features of that system was the ability to annotate output with its datatype. e.g., and I'll simplify notation here for presentational clarity (and to save me looking it up) but it's substantially like this:

(with-output-as-presentation (stream 'integer :data 5.3) (write-string "a bit more than five" stream))

This would cause the user to see the string "a bit more than five" but the system to have backing store information (kind of like the HREF that underlies a URL presentation in a browser, except that's really more imperative in nature rather than declarative) that says that if the user clicks on that, he's really clicking on 5.3 instead.

What was interesting about the way Genera did it was that there was a conceptual relationship between "presentation" (the analog of printing output) and "accepting" (the analog of reading input). If someone later did:

(accept 'integer :prompt "Please input a number")

then the mouse would become aware of all the occurrences of things that had been presented as integers (or even things that could be coerced to integers). The system could be further abstracted so that if you output British Pounds and someone asked for input of American Dollars, translators ran so that when you clicked on the value in pounds, it got translated at input time to the appropriate representation (presumably the translator you wrote knew how to acceess the currency exchange to do this). Output in inches could be converted to feet or meters, of course, without such network appliances.

But the key feature which seems to have been "obvious" even decades ago when Symbolics did this work was the idea of highlighting data of various kinds with boxes. In that case, it wasn't even limited to numeric data. It could be any kind of data, even things of different types that were hierachically presented (such a filename listing being sensitive on its whole line as a file, but as only part of the line for this and that date mentioned in the listing).

And it didn't get patented then, which to my understanding of patent law means it's missed its chance...

The really sad thing is that so few people know about this I/O paradigm, which had some very cool features. And then such sadness is compounded when others come along and attempt to say they dreamt up the idea.

I mean, geez, people have been drawing boxes around in paper for a long time. I don't doubt there's some implementation of a kids' book that has a piece of cellophane you can pull back and forth to highlight something. I recall things that use red over red text to make the text "become invisible" being implemented in physical books when I was a kid. That's a form of emphasis through boxes, too!

The patent office is way overboard these days. I think software copyright serves a critical purpose, but I think software patents are an abomination. I'd like to see the software patent system overhauled completely.