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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.
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 :(
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..."
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
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
But does it have rounded corners?
That's innovation.
Required reading for internet skeptics