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Microsoft Patents 1826 Choropleth Map Technique
theodp writes "A newly-granted Microsoft patent for Variable Formatting of Cells covers the use of 'variable formatting for cells in computer spreadsheets, tables, and other documents', such as using the spectrum from a first color to a second color to represent the values in or associated with each cell. Which is really not a heck of a lot different from how Baron Pierre Charles Dupin created what's believed to be the first choropleth map way back in 1826, when he used shadings from black to white to illustrate the distribution and intensity of illiteracy in France. By the way, beginning in March, the U.S. will switch from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system of granting patents. Hey, what could go wrong?"
How can We The People put an end to this nonsense? They are not patenting, so much as stealing. How can we petition the US PTO to have a patent re-examined and to have the a$$wipe who accepted the patent application be fired for incompetence?
It is time to go back to a 13 year patent and 17 year copyright cycle, with a renewal of patent available only to a Natural Person (e.g. not a fictional Corporation) holding a patent for one period, and with copyright renewable only by the Natural Person who authored the work, in 17 year periods, assignable to one spouse, children or heirs (other than Fictional Persons such as Corporations), until said person is deceased for three years.
If it worked for our founding fathers, who didn't have the Internet, and thus had longer lag times, it should work for America.
Exisiting patent and copyright grants should be allowed to conclude their grant cycle, provided it is less than or equal to said period, with the holder reverting to the Natural Person at the expiry of such lease. But not created and renewed.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
By the way, beginning in March, the U.S. will switch from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system of granting patents. Hey, what could go wrong?"
The entire rest of the world works just fine using first-to-file for patents. The US is an anomaly with first-to-invent.
I remember doing this in Excel ten years ago to make semiconductor device wafer maps and crude gray-scale images. You change the color palette to add more gray levels and then use conditional formatting to color the cells. Ta Da! An image! A patent on a fancier version of this is obvious so there should be no patent. Pfft!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
When I was working on internal sales tools for a company that sold shoes, I created a heat map of their sizing grid: I colored each data cell a lighter or darker shade depending on the sales number in that cell. It was so exciting and original that I think a couple people said "thanks, that's neat" before we moved on.
How the hell did this get patented, and how can I submit my prior art to invalidate it?
We've been experiencing this corruption of the patent system for over a decade now. It costs our nation millions and millions of dollars. Is there any serious effort to fix it?
If you don't like it, move to another country.
Oh wait, the rest of the world already does it that way.
This is Slashdot where every grandmother who can't write her own kernel drivers is considered sub-human scum but where IT geeks who barely made it through community college consider themselves experts on patent law.
Once and for all: First to file only applies when two different parties each file a patent application that covers the same subject matter within a short time period of each other (less than one year for all effective purposes in the U.S.
First to file does *NOT* change the rules on prior art and actually makes it *harder* to overcome prior art because there is no longer an ability to swear behind the filing date of the patent.
Other countries including Europe (you know, that magical perfect continent where nothing bad ever happens because it isn't the U.S. and that we should all just try to be like?) ALREADY USE FIRST TO FILE.
I haven't read the patent in question (but then again neither has the poster with a trained eye), but just because Microsoft is doing something that has some similarity to an existing mapping technique does NOT mean that Microsoft's technique is the same!
In much the same way that engines for cars already exist, it is perfectly possible to get a patent on an improvement to an engine even though engines existing all the way back in 1846!
Now please return to the standard recycled bigotry that passes for discussion on this site these days.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
If you don't like it, move to another country.
just boycott american products.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Whose ever said that Europe was magical that way? Certainly, some people have said some aspects of the European patent system (specifically, the fact that it doesn't recognize software patents) are superior, but that's pretty far from saying it is "magical" or "nothing bad ever happens", even in the narrow domain of the patent system.
Why bring up first to file in the summary? it is completely irrelevant, first to file doesn't mean prior art is ignored or that you can just go patent someone else's ideas. It merely means if 2 people/organisations are working in secret on their invention then it is whoever patents it first that gets the patent not whoever can spend huge amounts of lawyers and paperwork to try and show they had the idea 5 minutes before the other person.
This is like patenting the layout of a chess board. Absolutely ridiculous!
1: There is a ton of prior art in general
2: There is a ton of prior art for Excel specifically
Exhibit a) Microcharts from Bonavista Systems, released in 2006 or even earlier (http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/microcharts-a-different-take-on-excel-charting/)
Exhibit b) EVERY OTHER BI TOOL IN THE UNIVERSE
How incredibly incompetent are the people at the Patent Office? There is a mandated discovery process after all. What the hell is going on?
I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it -- Groucho Marx
As inventor, life gets more interesting. Just publish your inventions.
If somebody files a patent that involves your invention, tell them you want your share of the money or you'll have their patent invalidated by prior art.
Oh, and tell them win-win and Ying Yang as well :)
Privacy is terrorism.
Ya, Fuck the patent office.
Isn't this exactly a false color image like the IR imaging folks do all the time? Or a colored map showing rainfall levels or...etc. etc. etc.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
As soon as the first to file system goes in place, it will be the end of line for all Open Source projects,
It should not, if something is released Open Source then that will count as ''publication'', ie demonstrable prior art; thus anything that comes after that should not be patentable. The problem is in ''should not'', the patent examiners don't have enough time (and finding something in some Open Source bit of code will take a looong time) and I believe that the patent office is paid by patents granted - so has motivation to grant patents and let people battle it out in court; but court is do stupidly expensive.
Nothing. It is "first inventor to file". Under the present system if two inventors file for a patent on the same invention the one who invented first gets the patent: the order of filing is irrelevant (provided it was "timely" and the inventor "diligent"). Under the new system if two inventors file for a patent on the same invention the one who filed first gets the patent: the order of invention is irrelevant. Thus there will be no more lawsuits in which inventors strive to convince the court that they thought the widget up first and then worked diligently to reduce it to practice right up to the date they filed and therefor deserve the patent even though the other guy filed first. However, you still must be prepared to prove that you invented it independently.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Apparently it isn't just computer nerds. Appeals court judges and Economics professors also believe our industry is "special" and patents are failing the industry.
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright-law-restrict-competition-and-creativity-excessively-posner.html
Hm, seems to me like they reinvented pixmap.
AccountKiller
At the risk of giving away a possibly lucrative idea, my plan is to patent the use of a gavel to bring order to courtrooms. Hopefully, this will allow me to collect royalties for every day of all the various trials I have to attend defending my patent: the more they fight, the more they pay.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
This is like the secret fortune cookie decoder. add "in bed" after the phrase. Always works. IN this case it's take any known thing and add "using a computer".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"...they had the idea 5 minutes before the other person."
And that is what needs to be fixed in the patent system, short of abolishing altogether. Why do patents have to winner-takes-all when the historical record is full of examples of parallel inventions and discoveries, like the wheel, caculus or the theory of evolution? Why can't patents be awarded like the winners of sports competiton or American Idol, where even those who didn't place first gets a diminishing share of the prize money?
You do realize that the whole rest of the world is on a first-to-file system for patents already, right? theodp is an idiot an a troll who doesn't understand what the "first-to-invent" and "first-to-file" part even means. It's about when there are patent applications from two parties for the same idea. It has nothing to do with prior art.
You seek to mislead.
First to file *IS* a problem, because you can always make an 'invention' new by differentiating it under appeal, eliminating the prior art.
e.g. "Choropleth ON A COMPUTER" and if that's been patented, "Choropleth on a COMPUTER WITH WINDOWING OPERATING SYSTEM", and if that's been patented, "Choropleth on a COMPUTER RUNNING A SPREADSHEET IN A WINDOWING OS"
None of these can be blocked by the Choropleth.
Also the patent office can't consider trade secrets during development, so the patent system favors the vague early patent not the person actually making a working invention who then patents the finished *working* invention.
So you can look at what's being developed in the world right now: computer vision, and slap in a load of vague patents covering those: "Computer vision used to identify Train and Buses and show a map of their route on your visor" and bingo you've prevented one use of any future computer vision system without doing any more work than you'd put into a Slashdot post!
The Supreme court ruled that obviousness requires an invention be "more than the sum of its parts". The Federal Appeal court overturned that, it argued "to prevent hindsight bias" you could patent simple "X on Y" even if X exists and Y exists and X on Y is just X on Y the same as it was on X on Z.
So prior art is a joke, and the recent change, means the most important prior art (the prior art being made at the time the patent is applied for) is completely ignored.
They are not patenting, so much as stealing.
I have a deep suspicion that the United States government is actually encouraging the act of stealing by maintaining the patent system.
By filing a patent on a technique somebody had invented some 186 years ago Microsoft (and the United States Government) is essentially telling people to steal as much as they can, before someone else steals it from you.
BTW, has anyone patented the compass yet?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...American version of Siberia, say North Dakota...
Hi! I can see Russia from somewhere in the US, and I don't think it's North Dakota.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Ah Europe, where everything is so jacked up and tied together that we consider the entire continent a singular country.
It's a joke; it's pure class warfare. Doesn't matter if you invented it, if you can't afford to patent it, then fuck you.
AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
So many fucking morons equating first-to-file with the end of the novelty requirement and the death of prior art?
The ignorance, it burns.
With the patent switch now companies can steal IP and make it theirs. We should just get rid of patents altogether, although the sycophantic lawyers and there money will never let that one fly.
First to file only applies when two different parties each file a patent application that covers the same subject
Once and for all: If 2 people file for a patent at the same time it should be taken as pretty strong evidence that it's obvious to someone skilled in the art. So unless you're an idiot that thinks the patent system actually serves some useful purpose as it's currently implemented first to file just makes a bad system worse.
Who is John Galt?
And I don't think he realizes that the EU he wants to move to now adopted the first-to-file system long before the US did....
There are no technical details that are not obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art.
I'm not a programmer. I was a social science major in undergrad. My languages of choice are Perl and Visual Basic for Applications.
Why do I open myself up to the scorn of the /. community by revealing these facts? Because just this summer, I was about to implement EXACTLY what this patent describes when I was happy to find that the functionality already existed in Microsoft Excel. Thanks, Excel, for saving me some time. You deserve credit for that. But a patent? 20 years of exclusivity?
If the idea to do this, and the implementation (gee, look at maximums and minimum, set up a color scale or other visual indicator corresponding to certain values) was readily accessible to me (a person WITHOUT ordinary skill in the art), there is no reason this should have been granted a patent.
As the summary suggests, the claims seem broad enough that some of them (1, 8, and 15) might be invalidated by chloropleth mapping techniques present in GIS software.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Seriously, the claims aren't that had to understand, even though they're drafted in legalese that intentionally obscures how trivial the "invention" is.
Claims 1, 8, and 15 of the patent are broad enough that they very well could capture a chloropleth map. After all, a chloropleth map is really just a bunch of "cells" (regions) that you're assigning visual cues (colors) to based on a value they're associated with.
Maybe, just maybe, some of the finer dependent claims would meet the threshold of patentability, but the broader claims are obvious to anyone who's done more than dabble in Excel VBA.
IANAL (thank God), but FWIW I have taken IP law courses at one of the top two law schools in the country.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
You CAN'T know what the scope of a patent is without reading the claims, and without parsing every word and every piece of punctuation in the claims in order to determine just what features are being claimed. In some cases, you can't know what patent actually covers without reviewing the prosecution history that led up to the final issued version. Seriously. And you can't have any idea about the relevant issues from simply reading the title of a patent and a one-paragraph summary by a person who thinks that, because he or she is a whiz at C++, that he or she can understand patent claim language (assuming that he or she even read the claims, which is unlikely).
You are completely missing the point here. If, as you describe, someone has to parse the patent document and study it and any associated legal history for weeks or months on end, in order to understand it, then that neccesarily requires a LARGE time commitment.
If large numbers of patents are being issued, even if those patents represent really new ideas (which most of them don't) then we will end up expecting people to spend not just LARGE amounts of time, but HUGE amounts of time studying patents, as every potentially relevant patent must be studied in excruciating detail and we get a multiplication of the time per patent with the total number of patents. This time, of course, is time that can not be spent developing a person's own ideas.
Given the number of patents issued in a typical year, it is becoming more and more likely that doing this properly would leave no time left to do anything else! This is an enormously inefficient use of a person's time, and it is inappropriate for government to expect this from people.
Human time has value, because the human life span is precious, and in fact, far too short for most individuals to get anywhere near their full potential.
That doesn't stop people from wanting to try to do as much with their lives as possible, and that in turn is why so many people on Slashdot and elsewhere are objecting to the current system.
The behavior that you are seeing does not reflect ignorance, rather, it reflects an insight into what is actually happening now, and into a dangerous long term trend, that seems to be eluding you.
Recognition of the value of human time is why human societies (at least those with separation of church and state) treat actions such as kidnapping and murder as crimes -- the persons commiting these crimes are stealing a precious and irreplacable portion of a person's life.
It is not a legitimate role of government to become a contributor to the very abuses it is supposed to prevent, by acting in a manner that requires people to give up large portions of their lives, or face severe legal and financial consequences, when they are just engaging in things that should be considered reasonable conduct.
This is stealing a portion of a person's life, just as the kidnapper or murderer does.
In practice, given what a mess the patent system currently is, we can expect most people doing creative work to simply ignore the whole system, develop their own ideas, and hope that nobody else already patented the very same ideas they came up with on their own! This in turn means that ordinary people have to live in fear of an unreasonable (and in a free country, illegitimate) legal system. The legal system (and those who uphold it) becomes the enemy, instead of being a tool to limit the damage sociopaths can do to others (which is what legal systems should be focusing on). This sort of thing will invariably do tremendous long term harm to society.
Hey, what could go wrong?
Patent pending on the bonding of proteins to polypeptides for the purpose of amino acid creation and use.