Microsoft Applies to Patent RSS in Vista

Cyvros wrote in with a link to Wired's Monkey Bites blog, which is featuring a post on Microsoft applying for a patent on RSS. As the article points out, this isn't as crazy as it seems at first blush. From the wording of the application, post author Scott Gilbertson interprets their move as a patent on RSS only within Vista and IE7. From the article: "The big mystery is what Microsoft is planning to do with the patents if they are awarded them. The sad state of patent affairs in the United States has led to several cases of Microsoft being sued for technologies they did arguably invent simply because some else owned a generic patent on them. Of course we have no way of knowing how Microsoft intends to use these patents if they are awarded them. They could represent a defensive move, but they could be offensive as well -- [self-described RSS inventor Dave] Winer may end up being correct. It would be nice to see Microsoft release some information on what they plan to do with these patents, but for now we'll just have to wait and see whether the US Patent and Trademark Office grants them."

Comments

Wheel

[aedan]

Patent on the wheel can't be long in coming.

Re:Wheel

[troll -1]

You might find this interesting.

Re:Wheel

[jinxidoru]

Patent on the wheel can't be long in coming.

That would save the trouble of having to re-invent it.

Linux ?

[slashthedot]

Linus should patent both RSS and Atom in Linux before anyone else does.

Winer claims to have invented RSS....

[topham]

and nobody has bothered to dispute it because who the hell would want to claim such a convoluted design as their own?

Aw, but... but.....

[radarsat1]

Everyone was so *happy* when they decided to actually play nice and use an established icon for RSS.

Why would they turn around and piss everyone off?
WHY??

Oh wait... it's MS. Nevermind. Business as usual.

so hey.. does this mean Firefox will have to exclude that feature in upcoming Vista builds?

I can see it now:

#ifndef _MS_VISTA_ // patent crap.
Links.AddLiveBookmark();
#endif

Oh Yeah?!

[Greyfox]

Well I'm going to patent the 8.3 naming convention in the FAT filesystem! How do you like THEM apples?

Re:Oh Yeah?!

[leeosenton]

but them Apples don't even use 8.3 file names...

Who has Microsoft actually sued

[Timesprout]

over patent infringement? Actual cases and not the 'OMG they might sue us' screeching please.

Re:Who has Microsoft actually sued

[thue]

Here is one, on the ASF video file format: http://www.advogato.org/article/101.html

Re:Who has Microsoft actually sued

[kripkenstein]

"Who has Microsoft actually sued over patent infringement?"

Why make this a general debate about Microsoft's patents (or patents in general)? The current patent is very specific, and isn't accurately summarized in TFA anyhow, so debate here may be skewed. The actual patent states specifically, in the "Background" section:

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is one type of web content syndication format

i.e. Microsoft is NOT patenting RSS, which is one possible misconception. Secondly, the patent mentions various problems with RSS (various file formats, lack of a single unified reader for the entire desktop), which they intend to fix. So, they may be looking to patent a system that uses RSS or improves it; presumably this would run on Vista, but to say they are "patenting RSS in Vista" seems odd.

Re:Who has Microsoft actually sued

[dattaway]

Who would they sue? I believe everyone they could. IBM used to covertly sue everyone trying to manufacture a competing Personal Computer. They would quietly visit the company with their lawyers and ask them for royalties on several patents. If they balked, they informed them there were several thousand patents they could litigate with. Of course a deal was made and it was all NDA. Most of the companies slowly bled to death. These things rarely make the news.

Re:Who has Microsoft actually sued

[Waffle Iron]

Who has N. Korea actually nuked? Actual cases and not the 'OMG they might nuke us' screeching please.

Patents are Never Defensive

[jmcharry]

If you want only to defend your right to use something patentable, you just publish in a journal held by a number of libraries. IBM's Invention Disclosure Bulletin is an example of this. They publish everything they think might be patentable, but not worth the time and expense to patent.

That is not patent for RSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I quick read the application through. It is more about a system that aggregates RSS content further to other applications. Think of refactoring your RSS reading application into background daemon and sending the content via D-Bus to all subscribers. Something like that but it is definitely NOT a patent application for RSS itself, the main article is ignorant and written by someone really stupid.

I'd mod the main article as -1: Troll if I could. It's just anti-microsoft FUD.

Re:That is not patent for RSS

[mavenguy]

Correct, this is NOT claiming RSS; in fact it contemplates being used for Atom, too.

It's just providing a system-wide API for syndicated content, which might be any source, RSS only being one. Not saying it's patentable, of course, just that it is not intended to cover RSS itself.

Patent Interference, Litigation, and 102(b)

[jbf]

I've been really annoyed lately at how bad patents get awarded and then litigated...

In real patent litigation, the main way to claim invalidity is 102(b). This says that if the work was published in a printed publication, or for sale in this country, more than one year prior to the filing date, then the patent is invalid. There are other grounds for invalidity, such as 103 (obviousness), but because of bad case law, obviousness is a very slight extension to 102(b) (hopefully this will be fixed with KSR v Teleflex, currently before the US Supreme Court). This one-year bar essentially means that as long as I'm within one year of being the first to do it, and I'm the first to file for a patent for it, then I'll win as long as no previous inventors filed for a patent. (We're a first-to-invent system with some caveats; if the first inventor doesn't try to patent it, he can lose his patent rights to a later inventor).

In technology, one year is a really long time, so its important that everyone files for patents lest something "obvious" be granted, and your competitor take away all your customers by claiming that your technology infringes their patent. Its way easier to solve this problem before the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences than it is before a judge and jury who have no technical knowledge whatsoever (and probably try patent cases once in a blue moon). Sure, if you lose in district court, you can always appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but by the time the appeal is litigated, you may have lost most of your customers.

Microsoft's doing the smart thing by filing for this patent. Hopefully they'll also do the right thing by not abusing it.

They aren't patenting RSS

[adwb]

It seems to me after reading the patent application that they are trying to patent the API they created for allowing different programs within Vista (IE7, Outlook, etc) all share the same collection of feeds in various formats.

not Vista/IE7-specific

[oohshiny]

Second of all, from my reading anyway, Microsoft is not patenting RSS, but RSS within Vista/IE7. Of course I'm not a patent lawyer, I could be wrong about that.

You couldn't patent "RSS within Vista/IE7" if you tried. This patent looks like it's trying to cover broadly RSS syndication, RSS aggregation, RSS feed conversion, and object-oriented libraries for working with RSS feeds. The fact that it's beating around the bush and not patenting the RSS format itself is simply patent strategy: Microsoft's lawyers are trying to "build a fence" around RSS, leaving the open core open, but patenting everything around it so that you can't use RSS without infringing on their patents.

Make no mistake: if this patent gets granted, most RSS software will be infringing.

Re:they don't have to

[Timesprout]

So you are saying your inability to cite an instance of Microsoft suing, or even threatening to sue is clear evidence that this is exactly what Microsoft are actually doing. Thats just fucking brilliant. Rumsfeldian logic at its best.