Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Retracts Patent
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has retracted their recent controversial patent application. The story was first brought to light by Slashdot on Saturday. Today, Jane Prey of Microsoft announced the retraction on the SIGCSE (Special Interest in Computer Science Education) mailing list. 'Many thanks to the members of the community that brought this to my attention — and here's the latest. The patent application was a mistake and one that should not have happened. To fix this, Microsoft will be removing the patent application. Our sincere apologies to Michael Kölling and the BlueJ community.'"
My cynical reaction: The patent application would not have been pulled except for the written admission on the part of a Microsoft developer that the feature was copied from BlueJ.
When Slashdot did the 'bringing to light', it was Saturday. The developers 'brought it to light' for their crowd on Friday. To 'bring it to light' means that you've made some portion, usually a significant portion, of a group of people aware of it. The majority of the Slashdot crowd did NOT know about this before it was announced on Saturday, so it WAS 'brought to light'.
Happy?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Erm, there's a good chance it would have gone largely unnoticed for months if the story hadn't made /.
To be fair, months can mean the difference between sinking thousands of dollars into a patent and deciding to defend it, or cutting it loose.
Just to play a little devil's advocate:
Nobody is going to sue MomAndPop.com for patent infringement because its not profitable. They sue the Microsofts and the Apples who have the deep pockets to shell out big settlements. With software patents being the legal quagmire that they are, the only protection these corporations have from others abusing the system is to be the patent holder themselves. So they apply for a patent and this ends in one of a few ways:
They can't get the patent because someone else has it.
They can't get the patent because it is not patentable.
They get the patent.
They've avoided legal confrontation by having the patent office identify the first case. Either of the other two cases means that they can do whatever they were planning on doing without worry of getting sued for millions upon millions of dollars.
If the "little people" are so proud of their inventions, they should patent them. If they are such great ideas they will profit from licensing fees. Willfully choosing to not use the system means willfully choosing to not benefit from the protections and advantages it was designed to offer.