Microsoft [to patent] Verb Conjugation

streepje writes "Here [to be] the latest egregious patent application. Microsoft [to be] [to apply] for a patent for [to conjugate] verbs. Future postings [to look] like this."

Comments

Re:Oh please

[zeruch]

And I for one, have seen things that are certainly similar. At best what you are creating is a series of like values (I live (Engliah) = Eu vivo (Portuguese) = Iskun (Arabic), etc), and that is if you are doing translation (where such things have already been around). If it is for one language, then it is basically taking a "501 X Verbs" Book and making it searchable electronically, and adding it to the grammar/cpell check of a writing application. Unless there is some that extends beyond the simple idea of large tables of word/phrase data and maybe some kind of expert system with grammar rules that accounts for some of the varied iregular verbs of somelanguages, what you have is a rather bogus patent application.

More prior art

[Virtual_Raider]

In the spanish speaking world, unlike in english, there is an official academy of the language which monitors its development throughout all the spanish-speaking countries and updates the official Dictionary of the Academy accordingly. In their website they have a tool that does exactly the same as this patent describes. Would that count as prior-art or the fact that its in a different language might count as sufficient difference even though the process is about the same (if not more complex given that there are a lot more perks to spanish conjugation)?

Re:Oh please

[martin-boundary]

Looks like you're willfully misunderstanding the point as well. There is nothing difficult about listing all the possible conjugations of a verb: It's trivial to do it by applying the algorithms expressed in a good grammatical reference.

It's trivial to do it for a fixed language, and it's trivial to iterate over any set of candidate languages with a well defined grammar, doing it for each.

The fact that a book doesn't list all possible forms for each possible verb in an explicit table is irrelevant. The book is enough to generate those forms on demand, which is all an algorithm is required to do.

Now, there are certainly optimal (smallest number of operations, or maybe smallest RAM requirements, etc) algorithms out there which perform equivalently to any given published grammar book, but finding those is at best a cause for buying the programmers a case of beer, it's not worthy of a patent. After all, it doesn't significantly advance the state of the art.

Re:Misleading headline....

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Of course Microsoft has bullied programmers from releasing their code because it contains patents that Microsoft claims it owns. Yes, against small time people who cant afford the tens or houndred of thousands of money to get the patent revoked.

One highly publized example is VirtualDub which no longer support the .asf file format since Microsoft sent them a threat to stop VirtualDyb from using .asf files.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualDub

So yes Microsoft has no qualms about using their patents to stop open software being developed.

Re:Already been invented.

[Phisbut]

IANAL, thank God, but it seems to me that that would only be prior art if you had publicized it somehow. Prior art has to be public, for obvious reasons.

If you didn't publicize it, your prior invention only gives you the personal right to use your version of the technology without paying Microsoft. Until they sue you of course, then you'll either pay them or lawyers.

This piece of software has been for sale since 1996 (for French), and it does much more than what the patent covers (conjugate verbs), it's also a dictionnary with definitions (partly in the patent application for verbs), a thesaurus, a grammar, a spell and grammar checker (way better than what's embedded in MS-Word... it's a totally different league), and much much more. It's a must-have if you're even only remotely interrested in the French language.