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IBM Wants Patent For Lotus Notes-Free Meetings
theodp writes "Over at IBM, the Lotus Notes team has 'invented' preventing the use of their own product during meetings. Self-described patent reformer Big Blue has asked the USPTO for a patent covering Suppressing De-Focusing Activities During Selective Scheduled Meetings by forcing meeting attendees to 'submit to the computing system suspension requirements.' What's next — a patent for Verizon for blocking cellphone usage during movies?"
But this seems pretty tepid. Software designed to enforce situation-specific social norms is not at all new(SMART's somewhat creepily named "Synchroneyes" is one that has been commercially available for a long while now, MS's "digital manners" application came out a while back, and I've run into a number of browser plugins and other utility programs designed to stop timewasting).
The only novelty, and it is a slender one, is using a calendar event as a stimulus, rather than time or location or some other variable.
If IBM patents meeting without Lotus Notes, and doesn't license it, then that means everyone will have to have meetings WITH Lotus Notes! Most companies don't have it, so now they'll need to license it.
The app seems like a verbose way of saying that the calendar system shuts down access to other apps during the meeting; which is a technical solution to a social problem (people banging away on laptop keyboards during meetings)
One part of IBM's strategy for patent reform has been to build as large a patent library as possible, but enforce only (what they see as) legitimate innovation while using the rest only to club patent trolls. While I have no objection to anti-software patent advocates, or full-blown anti-imaginary property advocates, insinuating that IBM is guilt of misrepresentation or hypocrisy with this filing is absurd.
I don't know of any existing products with this functionality. So they wrote it up first, and you're bitching because you lack the creativity or ambition to do so yourself.
For prior art, check out any MMORPG with a parental control feature, or firewalls with time lock options. Maybe there's a sliver of innovation in that it custom schedules it based on when your meetings are, but that's pretty thin.
Oh, you don't like software patents? So competitive corporations should just throw in the towel and abandon patents that are allowed in our current system?
No, my plan is to bitch about them to draw attention to how broken the system is until we have the support to legislate them away. Until then I support companies' rights to keep trying for these things, and the people's rights to mock them for it.
DON'T. GIVE THEM. IDEAS.
It's not them you need to worry about...
In other news, Microsoft has patented the process of buying products from companies that aren't Microsoft. So now, if you buy a Microsoft product you will pay them some money, and if you buy someone else's product you will still have to pay them some money because of their patent. Industry analysts say they haven't noticed any difference from the status quo.
Indeed. We seem to be evolving a culture where we try to solve every problem with technology. Sometimes technology is not the answer. Sometimes you have to realise that technology is not curing the problem, it is just solving a symptom. And like most diseases, it will simply evolve around your attempt.
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