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Microsoft Deems Emotiflags Patent-Worthy
theodp writes "Microsoft said you could count on them to improve patent quality. For an example of how they're raising the bar on innovation, check out this just-published patent application for Emotiflags, which Microsoft explains solves the problem of indicating an emotion associated with an email message. At the risk of infringing on the patent, this one Makes Me Mad!"
no one cares
Like anyone believes that some Tool at Microsoft thought of this first. Seriously, does any Microsoft patent get an automatic stamp of approval by the bored patent examiner?
How much productivity is going to be lost when people are spending 5 minutes per day determining the best emoticon for each email they send?
Hey look it's Microsoft BoB!
Dont be mad, get Glad
They're going to have to fight Despair, Inc for the frowny-face emoticon.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Who on earth is going to care about this stupid feature? Oh man! Have to upgrade to the NEXT next version of Windows Office Vista JUST SO I can have the emotiflag feature! Yeah, great innovation their microsoft...
Microsoft patents stupidity. World governments cringe in terror!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This is so great, innovative, and quite amazing, it solves a common problem of not understanding the sarcastic tone of say... a post!
Well, the more stupid patents we get in there, the faster the system will change, hopefully.
Idiocy.
This "emotiflags" concept sounds awfully similar to the "current mood" flags MySpace uses for its blogging interface. I'm implying that MySpace created the concept; it's just one example of prior art.
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
I'm NOT implying that MySpace created the concept
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
Those emoticons made from parenthesis and colons started on AOL in about 1992.
Remember Bill Gates's first book, which "ignored the internet"?
The idea that Microsoft invented any such thing is preposterous, and if the USPTO lawyer drones actually issue such a patent it will completely prove how totally clueless they are.
We always knew it, but this will PROVE IT. I actually hope they do, because it will bring to light the importance of the REAL reform that is needed at USPTO.
Even congress will recognize it.
.
loads of examples exist in the 1980s USENET archives. I wonder how they thought they'd get this one through?
That the oral face, :-0 is patented. :-x
One part says 'We're going to be reasonable about patents' while another department is patenting everything they can think of.
It's typical of a large corporation to do this, where one part of the company has no clue what another part is saying or doing.
Microsoft has become an 'old style' organization.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"recently", "expanded". I don't think so.
Is now mandatory.
:) ;) ;/ ;\ :/ :\ I'll be back for my royalties in 2007!
Check the number of patents on the back of that gift card you just bought as a gift. Fancy corners? Got it's own hang tag? All patented and litigated recently.
The good news is I've patented emoting with ascii characters.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Might be wise to change the link to the photo page, not a direct link to the image.
What makes me mad is that someone saved this capture as a JPEG instead of a PNG, which would have been a quarter of the size and better quality.
:-( That is all I have to say about this news.
Will we get access to cool new rulesets too? Can we filter all emails with crying faces to the "Crying Face Email" folder?
D00d, that would be such a ruthlessly efficient method for organizing emails! Sweet!
. .
L . . .
L . \ . . . [ ] \
. \----\___________]
. . .
.
Ignoring for a moment how patently absurd this feature is (pun intended), I can't see how a patent like this would have any value to the holder.
This seems like one of those features that if it didn't get adopted completely (yahoo, gmail, aol, etc, etc) then it would just be ignored by users. If I were crafting e-mails with emotiflags (and were a 13 year old girl), I'd probably just give up on picking the pretty little icons since all my friends who aren't using Outlook can't see them anyway.
And this certainly isn't one of those must-have features where companies are going to rush to get a license from MS for fear of having an "incomplete" product. This type of thing is clearly aimed at younger users who, in my experience, are almost all using free e-mail services...most of which aren't by MS. Well that's if they're using e-mail at all anymore with IM and MySpace.
Maybe I just don't understand, but it doesn't seem worth the effort for them. On the bright side, at least this is one MS patent that I don't fear will infringe on anything I am or will be working on.
This sig intentionally left blank.
the retardedness of the patent is clear, but this is also a bad idea anyway.
it looks like it needs to be built into email composers/readers like a standard, but no patent-based addition to an established standard would ever get accepted anyway.
and even if it did... what's the point? how hard is it to put a smiley face in the subject line? or to actally type "this is sweet". who's going to bother with "this makes me mad" tag when knocking out a quick "fuck you" email?
argh, this patent is so stupid on every possible level.
Could it be that Microsoft is flooding the patent office with junk patents just to prove how incompetent they are so that the system gets revamped?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
One needs to keep in mind that a published applictaion is nowhere near an issued patent. So far, none of the claims in the app have been examined by the USPTO. Once that happens you can expect to see some of them disallowed.
-- I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.
... or someone else will patent it first !
Read radical news here
It's not a case of "should", we all know the patent office thinks any patent with the word "computer" in it is novel and deserves the filing fee.
eg. A quality Microsoft patent Another quality Microsoft patent
No sig today...
Emoticons started in 1972, but emotiflags--replacing emoticons with graphical images--are more recent. I believe some of the chat clients started doing that first. By the time this patent was filed, many E-mail readers, chat clients, and wikis were doing it.
Remember when BT patented the hyperlink? But they didn't just patent it; in a bid to become the worst patent troll the world has ever known, they actually tried to enforce it.Both BT and Microsoft lobby for software patents here in Europe, but if Microsoft says it is interested in improving quality and only applies for junk patents defensively, it is at least believable. When British Telecom does the same, as it did recently in its submission to the Gowers Review:
Equally, we are supportive of all efforts by Patent Offices to improve the rigour of their searching and examination of patent applications, to ensure a strong system that precludes users from obtaining patents of dubious validity in any area of technology. Such dubious patents can hinder the development of competing products and damage the interest of all companies large and small. We look forward to contributing to the recently announced Patent Office consultation on inventive step requirements for patentability.
it is pure hypocrisy.
I'm not sure what sickens me most, the fact that this can be patented or the fact that somebody out there thinks "Emotiflags" are a neat idea.
No sig today...
Say what you will, but:
:) and :(
1) "Emotiflags" is a brand new term. A search on Google only showed 5 hits, all of which were emoticon flags (as in country flags), not emotional flags like
2) One of the biggest problems people have with email is that it doesn't convey emotion. If the use of this concept becomes commonplace, it could mean good things for email. Being able to look at the emotion prior to opening the message will mean a lot less miscommunication.
3) While message forums have been doing this for ages, this is the first time I've seen it applied to email as some kind of header deta along with the to, from, subject, importance, etc.
And for what it's worth, the patent was filed almost a year and a half ago.
-David
They also file patents on the emotions anger, frustriation and disgust since their products and marketing tactics are a primary cause of such emotions users should pay them when feeling those soon to be patented emotions.
this is basically a stripped down usage of X-Face, using just an "emoticon" to make it less obviously so.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
In Universities professors are under a lot of pressure to get their names onto papers. This often leads to papers that dont really do much to advance human knowledge being published. I have a few friends that have gone on to work for big research labs rather than stay in academia and I hear prettymuch they same thing from them. You have to produce something tangible to justify your existance and for most researchers in big companies this means you must apply for patents. Same problem as academia, just replace the word "Paper" with "Patent" and "Publish" with "Apply for". Microsoft is hardy unique in this although they seem to get the most negative publicity for it. Look as some of the stuff IBM has patents for. Not every researcher at IBM made a groundbreaking invention.
Look around at many modern web forums (e.g. Invision Board) and you can set an icon to go next to the topic title. Applying the same thing to email does not make innovative.
-1 NO EMOTIFLAG
Your sarcasm wasn't spelled out for me. Furthermore, I'm filing a lawsuit for intentionally causing me confusion and emotional distress while trying to figure out if your post was insulting me or not.
And acts the other way....
Very common tactic - mainly in politics: Put out the "word" - do what you "need" to do anyway
A sufficient number of people read the "word" and are convinced that Microsoft is actually a well behaved company.
Of cause that depends on your criteria. In extracting money from other's they are brilliant.
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
omg yet another slashdot-published microsoft-bashing (love those -s) article. let's try and figure out which email client (outlook, evolution, hotmail, gmail or the one that your mom wrote) currently uses emoticons to tag messages.
c'mon people. this is slashdot. surely there's emoticonmail on sourceforge that lets you collect your email and tag it by emoticon and runs on gentoo (or another esoteric linux distro which could be cited as prior art).
NO?
oh well. so microsoft has no precedent to worry about. definitely no precedent regarding LABELLING email with EMOTICONS. so why is everyone so teen-angsty about microsoft's patent? you didn't think about it first and didn't patent it so they patented it. y'know what... the simplest ideas often bring about a feeling of "oh that's so stupid i coulda done that" but you didn't. too bad. now why don't you stop talkin' sh*t about it and get ready to pay them whatever licensing fees they demand for the next 17 years?
yet another slashdot article bashing microsoft just 'cause it's an article about microsoft.
If this patent goes through, then wouldn't that give Microsoft incentive to start suing blog sites such as Livejournal, Blogspot, and Myspace for royalties because "in a sense, blogs are like e-mails except more people read them"?
Long ago, before I got my first E-Mail address, I used to have a FidoNet address (2:293/32--.-- (last digits removed)).
... like our E-Mail headers).
This was a computer mailing system including EchoMail (quite similar to Usenet Newsgroups) and NetMail (quite similar to E-Mail). BBS used to phone each other every night to exchange the mail packets.
Several Fidonet Mail reader were able to use the "MOOD:" header, an header whose use was to tell the mood of the writer of the message... All headers were (if I remind well) lines beginning with 0x01 then the header name, ":" then the content (origin address, subject,
This emotiflag is nothing more than the MOOD header there used to be on Fidonet... I live in Europe but if someone wants to submit that as Prior Art, I know for sure that the "Terminate v4.0" Terminal + Point system (system to get and read Fidonet mail for end-users) under MS-DOS did manage these MOOD header (I don't know for the other Fidonet readers)
We might need another bit to implement this on IP level.. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt
I mean I have been doing this with Emoticons for years.
My adapted version of webmail exchanges emoticons with images in Subject lines. I have smart folders that can act on whether there is an emoticon.
So there is nothing new about this. So I want to claim prior art!
One of the first patents in England was for colouring for stained glass. Anyone who could make a special colour either had to keep the recipie a secret, or risk their apprentices being hired by a rival. The Antykithera mechanism shows what happens when there is no patent law - the technology and science for making geared computers for complex calculations was so well hidden that it was totally lost and forgotten. We have no odea how many of these machines there might have once been.
Patenting does not necessarily mean you, personally, had a good idea. If you funded some shipping venture, went abroad and studied, and brought back a useful process (silk production, bone china, etc) then you could patent that. This survived into UK law up until about 1968. These days, travel and communications have made travel expense as a basis for a patent obselete. If we go to the stars, maybe it will come back again.
The US patent system had recently allowed patents on software, and buisness practices. The patents seem to have little to do with an extended piece of research, or travelling. The actual venture costs seem to be in the costs of achieving a patent portfolio. This is a venture like any of the previous examples through history. However, it is not making wealth for the general society any more than employing people to dig holes and others to fill them in again contributes to general employment. The rest of the patenting world has been reluctant to accept these changes just because they do not seem compatible with the aims of patents in general.
If anything, the real problem lies with the US patent department. I used to work on patents for Canon at the time when software patents were becoming possible - first in a programmed machine, then on media combined with a programmable machine, then on the media to be combined with a suitable machine, and so forth. Large companies may not want to plunge huge resources into building a software patent portfolio, but when software patents become possible, they must join in the land grab or lose out. Microsoft is doing the same thing that any large company would do.
Exact same feature is found on Lotus Notes, dating back at least to Notes 5... Don't they check anything ? Heck, isn't the Notes guy now in charge of something in M$
Lotus Notes has been doing this for years - although of course it's only supported in Notes :)
They don't have a trademark. Despair, Inc. is a humor site, of course, and they joke about their "trademark":
:-( symbol left many in the field of intellectual property law stunned.
Quote: The decision to award Despair, Inc. with a registered trademark for the
Suzanna Larkow, I.P. specialist of Larkow, Madley & Associates, said of the issuance, "This is a defining moment in the history of intellectual property law. To extend official registration to an emoticon, one who's common usage predated the existence of the trademark holder by several years, defies common sense and establishes a dangerous precedent."
To change a lightbulb?
None, They just patent "Darkness" and call it the new standard!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Remember that "Ask Slashdot" question the other day? "Why Does Everyone Hate Microsoft?" Well here's a prime example. Their desire to expand the empire and attempt to patent email-level emoticons is just not for silliness. They will no doubt add these as flags to their email program and use this extension as a weapon to fight off open source competition. Their target market - the great unwashed - doesn't care about any of this - they just want to put a frowny face on an email.
BTW: Daryl Cagle had a particularly poignant Microsoft cartoon back from their anti trust days but I see that archive is now gone! What finally killed it conspiracy or disinterest? (maybe lack of disk space?)
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
What a bunch of (_!_) 's, (_o_) 's and 8==> 's!
I couldn't help it. My distant days of IRC made me do it.
Hpy
Considering how much it costs Microsoft to file the patent, that little gem just cost them 100K. I think MS should try to file 50million patents each year, then maybe real patent reform will finally take place. If you Microsoft is bad, go look at IBM or other patent whores. Real innovation by the small guy deserves patent protection. Blatant patent whoring by corporations should include a fine.
For a second there I thought MS was going after those annoying kids who shop at Hot Topic. And chose to use a very politically incorrect term to refer to them (my version didn't have the 'ti' or the 'l').
sic transit gloria mundi
Emotiflags sound awfully similar to... Mood Stamps found in Lotus Notes mail client dating back farther than I can remember.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Which wouldn't be an entirely bad thing, except that the fuckwits have substantial influence over the patent laws of other countries.
I couldn't really give two shits whether the USA cuts its own balls off by making it impossible to innovate without treading on idiotic patents, but it does piss me off that the USA's stupidity is allowed to influence the rest of the civilized world.
FOAD, US Patent Office.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Isn't it a crime to file a patent application for something you didn't actually invent.
It is a t least purgery to sign it.
If something is obvious, not innovative, and done before, can you patent it? Yes! As long as you are the first person to patent it, you can patent anything!
I say this is all seriousness, because that's what the system as devolved to. This is why companies try to patent everything, because if they don't their competitors will.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
By patenting this particular technology, they are guaranteeing that it'll never succeed. And it's such a retarded idea that I don't want it to succeed.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If this is really so useful, explain to me why no one uses manual emotiflags, like the one in this message?
Actually, that's not true. Some people do, and they might think it's cool for it to look better/different, but most of us don't, because it just isn't that useful. Text can already express everything we want to say in an email.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think I speak for everyone when I say:
c|......|
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Now I don't have to spend any time trying to compose a written letter which has to convey both the objective and subjective meanings. I can just blast out whatever comes out first and then cover my ass with an emotiflag so I don't really sound like an asshole. I wonder if it's binding?
That's disgusting, and funny! I thought they were joking in general. I didn't realize that they were demonstrating U.S. government corruption. (Big companies want lax patent and trademark practice so that they can use weak patents and trademarks to intimidate.)
Quoting again from the Despair, Inc. web site: "This is a defining moment in the history of intellectual property law. To extend official registration to an emoticon, one who's common usage predated the existence of the trademark holder by several years, defies common sense and establishes a dangerous precedent." Despair, Inc. is hassling the Trademark office about granting them a trademark!
(Here's a short summary I wrote of U.S. government corruption: George W. Bush comedy and tragedy.)
Dear christ people. The company that is willing to lay down major bucks and risk far, far more by fighting for patent reform, and everyone assumes that they WANT a patent on 'emote flags', or whatever the hell else they patent.
M$ certainly has a lot of patents that they really, really like. Some of them are even rather important in industry. I doubt this is one of them. This is called a defensive patent: 'I have the patent, it was approved, nobody else can get it and sue me later'.
The USPTO created this situation by deciding that the courts should be the ones to decide patent validity. Grow up and blame the right people.
Hint, it isn't M$. This time.
Qualcomm's Eudora has had "mood watch" for a long time. The hotter the flame inside, the more chili peppers the message earns. This seems to be significant prior art.
Patents are published before allowance for a reason. The Slashdot community could be an effective filter for nonsense patents. So--in addition to complaining on Slashdot, why don't some of you who are experts in a particular field (say, emotiflags) get involved in the public review process and cut off some of these applications at the knees.
here's how.
I am going to refer to an analog of the DOD formatting of message traffic at the paragraph level:
(U) This sentence or para is UNCLAS (unclassified)
(C) This sentence or para contains C O N F I D E N T I A L information
(S) This sentence or para contains S E C R E T information
(TS) This sentence or para contains T O P S E C R E T information
Now, I could also refer to SoftArc's First Class BBS features, but...
Also, just consider HTML in web pages. What about ALL those BBS that use emoticons and avatars?
Fucking microsoft.
So, for ALL the e-mail and word processor and database producers out there, just say NO to mshaft by doing this:
Set up the application text interface to operate more like a DATABASE; each hard return should flag the user to insert a sensitivity, emotional state or dissemination restricted/dissem unrestricted marker. (Actually, this would operate like screenplay software and like various word processors OLE-like use of data fields. Actually, in Lotus Word Pro, they're called Power Fields. In mshaft word, they have their own thing. WordPerfect and SO/OO.o write have theirs, and on and on....
NOW, when lame, stupid assed corporations generate documents and then claim the ENTIRE DOCUMENT is COMPANY PROPRIETARY, this kind of system would FORCE companies and individuals who generate docs to JUSTIFY the slapping on of sensitivity markings and to THINK OUT the format or structure of interrelated information.
"Emotiflags" are NOT new, just a new name on something that is done in different ways. Combining DOD paragraph classification/sensitivity warnings, with paragraph emotional or tone flags is not a giant leap in invention, and should AUTOMATICALLY FAIL the USPTO non-obviousness claims.
Now, if mshaft patented this for the purposes of making sure ALL could use it and NONE could patent it to deprive others of it, then my tone in this e-mail would be decidedly friendlier or non-opined toward mshaft in this matter.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
emoticons, so to say. Those are not supported by the current M invented emoticon driving technology and never will be. Sad, should I sue them because they do not care about my own emoticons?
Or do they provide a way for inclusion of self-defined emoticons? If so, they are really at it and top of the notch, so to say. Remembers me somehow of M research where they do whatever shit has done before, calling it innovation.
Who actually cares about them anyhow, the American patenting system is already down the drain and will go down further with M recognizing it. Somehow this remembers me on the way they dealt with technology, look at it now!
Cheers for a brighter M deprived future
Carsten
shit, why does slashdot not support the paragraph sign? replace all occurrences of M with M paragraph sign please.
Hi!
Nope--I'm not stoned, and I'm not insane. And while I'm not a patent attorney, I am involved with patents and intellectual property development for an electronics company.
Why patent something this simple?
There are zillions of patents out there for seemingly trivial things. Case in point: Amazon.com's infamous "one-click" shopping patent. Why in the world would anybody want to patent this? The patent application in TFA would seem to fall into the same category--why in the world would Microsoft want to patent something so obvious as an emoticon?
It's not the patent--it's where the patent application is filed
Different countries have different systems of patent application. In the U.S., patents are issued--and litigated--based on the principle of first discovery. If you and I each--independently--discover a method for creating, oh, temporary freckles, the USPTO will award the patent to whichever of us can demonstrate that we reduced our idea to fixed form (in most cases, wrote down a detailed description of the invention) first. It doesn't matter that you filed first--if I came up with the invention months before you, and can prove it, I win.
Many other countries use a different system, named "first to file." This system eliminates the litigation over who wrote down how much when, and at what point was enough written down to have something worthy of a patent. Many Europeans tout this as a feature of their system. But "first to file" has a nasty side effect: you can be the first to file about all sorts of stuff, and thereby prevent anybody else from doing something that seems obvious.
Think of this as the patent equivalent of domain squatting
Remember domain squatting? In the early days of the World Wide Web entrepreneurs were registering the name of every corporation in the world--in the expectation that when Amalgamated Widget came to want a web site, they'd have to buy amalgamatedwidget.com domain. The difference between "first to file" and "first discovery" can be used in the same kind of way: a patent filed for something trivial (like emoticons) can be issued in a "first to file" country. So long as the applicant, or the patent authority, are not aware of a competing patent in existance some place else, the applicant gets the patent.
So what? So suppose a company in the U.S., like Qualcomm (developers of Eudora, which has displayed emoticons to warn you of offensive language since at least version 6) notices that a patent has been issued for emoticons in a "first to file" country like France. That patent is worthless in the U.S.--Qualcomm developed the technology first. But it effectively blocks Qualcomm from selling Eudora in France--because Qualcomm's own invention violates the French poacher's patent.
So what do you do?
If you're working with technology in a "first discovery" country (principally the U.S.) you have to make a point of patenting everything--especially all the teensy-tiny innovations that make your product special. Because if one of those key features is not patented, you can be shut out of a huge market by some wise guy who beats you to the patent office.
How bad is it? Suppose that you're in the electrical devices business--and you come out with a new line of designer outlets. Suppose that you include a useful improvement on the outlet design--you chamfer the edges of the receptacle to make it ever-so-much easier to stick the plug in the wall. A nice little effect--but people have been chamfering edges to make connections easier for decades, so why bother paying the fees to file a patent? Bring out your new line of 240-volt electrical receptacles for Europe--and some joker runs down to the patent office in Vienna, filing a patent on chamfering electrical receptacles. That patent is worthless in the U.S.--but it shuts you out of Austria, which probably means that European electrical distributors and retailers won't carry your line at all. You have to pay off the poacher to "li
In the future, spam filters will put anything with "Time Critical" and "Good Idea" emotiflags directly in the trash. Then again, no aquaintance of mine would be caught dead using this. This could be a great new way to filter your messages.
Microsoft has filed for a patent on the letter R. Said a MS spokesperson, "there are no preexisting patents on the concept of R".
"Make cyberlove, not cyberwar!" -Khaed(544779)
Lotes has been able to attach a "mood stamp" to an e-mail for years. This is definitely not new or innovative.
It's another FUD about the ways of digital communication and how MSFT is doing its darndest to make a buck when their cash-cows are quickly being abducted by penguin-shaped aliens and casual-dressed hipster marketing images. (Note: The hipsters aren't really taking any MSFT business away.)
In the end, what's the patent really about? It's about a bit of data that a Microsoft product puts on an e-mail message.
Can they patent the smiley/frowney/angry/rolley/etc?
No. That's not what this is about.
Can they patent any emotional expression in e-mail?
No. That would be unconstitutional as it would restrict freedom of expression.
Can they patent e-mail messages that are "flagged"?
Obviously not, since that has pre-eminently entered into common usage among almost every text-communication medium, and is therefore akin to "public domain".
Can they patent a flagging system that is parsed client-side into a corresponding emoticon to represent an entire e-mail message?
We'll see.
That is what this post is really about; MSFT profiteering over a miniscule convention in technology that only slightly colors the digital landscape and will ultimately be worked-around like any other obstacle.
[The] two basic concepts of the Internet: the Internet routes around obstacles and enables communication to all nodes from all nodes. How does the Internet do this? It does that because on the Internet all nodes are equal. On the Internet all nodes are free to communicate.— Steve Sloan
RTFA indeed.
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.