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Microsoft's Bold Patent Move

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the is-this-actually-real dept.

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.

1 of 571 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Well... by dilute · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.