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Microsoft Patents a Slider, Earning EFF's "Stupid Patent of the Month" Award (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes with news that the EFF has given Microsoft a dubious award this month for their slider patent. According to Ars: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation's 'Stupid Patent of the Month' for December isn't owned by a sketchy shell company, but rather the Microsoft Corporation. The selection, published yesterday, is the first time the EFF has picked a design patent as the SPOTM. The blog post seeks to highlight some of the problems with those lesser-known cousins to standard 'utility' patents, especially the damages that can result. The chosen patent (PDF), numbered D554,140, would seem to be one of those things that's so simple it raises some basic philosophical questions about the patent system. That's because it's just a slider, in the bottom-right corner of a window, with a plus sign at one end and a minus sign at the other. That's it.
I am ashamed to be american sometimes, but proud not to use microsoft for anything.
This isn't like utility patents. This doesn't cover all sliders with + and - at the ends. It covers us elements that subjectively look like this.
Coca Cola is the famous example of a design pattern for a glass bottle with a twist. It's not a real problem. It's not utility patents.
A design patent covers the look ONLY - the ornamental design. For the MS patent, change the center pointer to a diamond, or to a rounded (rather than pointy) design and you're in the clear. They are EXTREMELY easy to get around, and interpreted VERY narrowly. Basically any change to the look and you're in the clear.
Design patents tend to be sops to engineers/designers as a way to "pad their resumes", or as ways to simply increase the number-patents-issued list of companies. It's so much more impressive to say you got 138 patents versus saying you got 1 - but if the 1 is a utility patent, and the 138 are design patents, the actual IP-use (restriction of competiton) value is most likely in favor of the singular utility patent.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
--cover the ornamental, nonfunctional aspects of a design. Think fins on a car, or the flare of the fenders -- again, ornamental and nonfunctional. There's a set of early design patents on the patterns produced by one manufacturer's water fountains.
Design patents on icons and UI elements go back twenty years or more. Early on they were sort of an arms-race among companies with GUIs (disclosure: I'm a patent attorney and filed quite a few design patents for icons over a period of a few years).
Seeing how they cover, once again, ornamental and nonfunctional aspects of a design, getting sued on a UI design patent practically means someone has done something really stupid, like copying the elements of someone's UI design.
Come on, draw your own slider! Use squares instead of circles at the ends! Do something original! Or be ready to argue that the aspects of the element you copied are functional, and not ornamental.
I"m not a fan of patent litigation, but to get nailed on design patents usually means it's pretty close copying.