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Surfcast Sues Microsoft Over Tile Patent
An anonymous reader writes with news of a company suing Microsoft for infringing upon a patent for tiles with live content. From the article: "SurfCast, in a complaint filed yesterday in a U.S. District Court in Maine, said Microsoft infringes one of its four patents — No. 6,724,403 — by 'making, using, selling, and offering to sell devices and software products' covered by SurfCast's patent. That includes mobile devices using the Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 operating systems as well as PCs using Windows 8/RT."
so both simple rectangle and rounded rectangle are now patented!
Trust me, I'm an engineer.
I can see why SurfCasts tiles didn't take off. That's beyond ugly. Since Microsoft referenced SurfCasts patent in their patent, I suspect Microsoft determined that they were different enough to not require a licensing deal.
The Microsoft Live Tiles use data that's been curated for the purpose of a tile. SurfCasts is making little windows onto programs that have no idea their being ran in a little window.
A tile is just a chromeless application window. What's novel about it?
A computerized method of presenting information from a variety of sources on a display device. Specifically the present invention describes a graphical user interface for organizing the simultaneous display of information from a multitude of information sources. In particular, the present invention comprises a graphical user interface which organizes content from a variety of information sources into a grid of tiles, each of which can refresh its content independently of the others. The grid functionality manages the refresh rates of the multiple information sources. The present invention is intended to operate in a platform independent manner.
Seriously?
A) How was this even granted a patent in 2000? It's really obvious, to anyone with a computing degree.
B) How it wasn't picked up on a patent search.
C) Why didn't they sue two years ago when WP7 was released?
Software patents are fundamentally wrong :(
I went through the patent. I will not claim there is anything of value in there. But they actually describe a full architecture of a system with asynchronous event, bandwidth limitations, dynamic refresh rates, multi device displays. They actually did something, they are not trolling. This is one of the most reasonnable patent I read in a long time.
Mothafucka's patented the SQUARE
Shit. I'm about to get Platonic on that one, and patent me a CUBE.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So the patent is for blocks of active information in boxes? Filed in 2000? Microsoft was doing this with Active Desktop back in 1997 and I'm sure they weren't the first.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Too late. I already patented the hypercube.
All dots, lines, squares, and cubes are lower dimensional derivatives of my hypercube design and thus require a license from me.
Dunno, I used dockapps on windowmaker well before they granted the patent to Microsoft.
After reading the article, I really think that SurfCast is right in suing Microsoft. It seems to be the same thing and it's a novel way of doing things.
It doesn't even matter how valid the patent is, really (although given it is software and... well, a tile display is not novel no matter how you dress it up), what really makes a troll a troll is that they have no products. Surfcast has none, and from what I understand, never did. Therefore, they are patent trolls.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Not sure what version of windows had this last, but I remember being bale to tile all open windows, and they would take up all available screen real-estate. It wasn't a horizontal tile, wasn't a vertical tile, and wasn't a cascade. It may have been arrange, but I remember doing it once with 10 excel windows open on like 640x480, and they each took up so little space you could only see the control bars.
I don't think MS is going to have a problem with this: http://asset0.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/10/31/SurfCast_patent_application_610x587.png
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
It seems to be the same thing and it's a novel way of doing things.
Exactly, it's not like it is similar to an airplane dashboard, right? And did anyone notice the timing? Coinciding a lawsuit with an OS release, that's not suspicious at all, tsk tsk tsk...
Ezekiel 23:20
Also, someone else patented the time cube.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
And the companion cube probably has trademarks to deal with.
Yes it does. It's called laches and igt can invalidatre a lawsuit.
Are you kidding, trolling or are you just misinformed? Windowmaker dockapps could retrieve weather infos from remotely accessed sources ten years ago at the least, there were/are dozens of email dockapp, there are dockapps that notify when a website updates and there are even web radio dockapps. Perhaps the 2004 patent granted to surfcast is invalid, for sure the 2011 patent granted to MS is invalid and I hope that this litigation could invalidate it (at least a 2004 patent expires before a 2011 patent).
Seriously, go look at these "screenshots" of product. And tell me how their product was anything different than all the horrible 1990's websites built with frames, that continually refreshed.
Seriously, this shouldn't even go to court....
http://web.archive.org/web/20070420033547/http://www.surfcast.com/images/bloom.jpg
http://web.archive.org/web/20070101195114/http://surfcast.com/images/trading.jpg
http://web.archive.org/web/20070101163517/http://surfcast.com/images/weather.jpg
http://web.archive.org/web/20070126130038/http://www.surfcast.com/images/word_doc.jpg
Windows 95. Active Desktop.
Sure, the implementation was plagued with bugs, but it would update square widgets with data from remote sources. It was in Win95.
But does it have rounded corners?
That's innovation.
Required reading for internet skeptics
That certainly adds an extra dimension to this case.