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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!
There should not be any patentable user interface designs. Suppose Ford patented the steering wheel? Then everyone other than Ford who makes cars would be trying to reinvent the control scheme, and then the drivers would be stumped when they sit in that car.
Jokes on you, Microsoft. My browser's bottom-right slider doesn't have a plus or minus on it.
The OP apparently does not understand the difference between a design patent and a utility patent. He/She should learn this before calling this design patent stupid or whatever other inappropriate language was used. Utility patents describe a function; design patents describe only the appearance.
--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.
I do believe White Castle has prior art on that one.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It seems there's roughly 10 silly or trivial patents for every good one. Unless something drastic changes to fix that, the patent system is net drain on progress.
Most innovations come about via working on a specific product, not R&D for R&D's sake. Thus, most new ideas would happen anyhow.
As far as the idea that patents make ideas public, a private firm(s) can catalog ideas from existing products or submitters if there's really a market for such. They'd probably do it cheaper than the gov't also.
Table-ized A.I.
You do realize he is not using your Windows machine to display his message on your flat screen, right?
goto "The hell you say"
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Oh my god, Microsoft just never stops innovating, do they?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If you have to go back 8 years to find a design patent to even claim to be egregious, things must be going pretty well.
Little greasy hamburgers are safe. I have it on good authority that this is just some arcane GUI widget with the same name.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's the stupid ones that make for entertaining reading.
The 500 perfectly good patents processed today don't make news.
This is what a design patent is like:
"Be it known that I, AUGUESTE BARTHOLDI, of Paris, in the Republic of France, have originated and produced a Design of a Monumental Statue, representing 'Liberty enlightening the world....'
The statue is that of a female figure standing erect upon a pedestal or block, the body being thrown slightly over to the left, so as to gravitate upon the left leg, the whole figure being thus in equilibrium, and symmetrically arranged with respect to a perpendicular line or axis passing through the ead and left foot... The right arm is thrown up and stretched out, with a flamboyant torch grasped in the hand.... The head, with its classical, yet severe and calm. features, is surmounted by a crown or diadem, from which radiate divergingly seven rays, tapering from'the crown, and representing a halo."
That protected Bartholdi against anyone making copies of the Statue of Liberty for fourteen years.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Copyright does last a very long time, so I don't think most people -want- objects to be copyright protected rather than patent.
The four classes are:
Utility patent: the functional implementation of a functional thing, a machine. Does not cover artistic / decorative elements.
Design patent: Cosmetic design elements of a functional thing. Covers only non-functional decorative / artistic choices.
Copyright: Artistic works which have no functional purpose, things which are only viewed/heard, not used (other than for viewing/reading/hearing).
Trademark: A brand name or symbol indicating who makes or sells the product.
Delorean couldn't get any copyright on the artistic design elements of the Delorean car because a car is a functional thing. They could possibly get a design patent covering unique appearance features, but only to the extent that they aren't required for proper function of the car. So you could probably design patent "a hexagon steering wheel with blah blah blah...", because a round one works as well. But the patent would cover only a _hexagon_steering_wheel_ with those other features, not "steering wheel" (functional) or "hexagon".
No, it's less stupid. Go and look up design patents. It's not what you're imagining if you think people are assholes. At worst it's kind of silly. At *worst*.
Only until someone gets sued. Then it stops being just stupid and becomes dangerously malicious.
If they want to keep someone from using their appearance, then have them use a trademark.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's a design patent, it does not cover functionality, only appearance. It's not shitty, rather it's people that are ignorant and stupid.
The Patent application (publication) is three pages in total. That is incredibly short.
It also has (for now) only one claim, not a list of claims of various scope.
It also lacks a list Examples or Embodiments, which are the structure that support a Patent when contested or claimed in Court.
Last, the Figure shown on the front page looks very, very Mac-like. As if they are trying to get Patent coverage for a Design which already exist(ed) on the drawing boards of a competing firm.
Note that this was filed in 2006 or 2007 (I won't waste the seconds to check). Mac OS X Finder does indeed feature this exact type of magnification slider in the bottom-right of any Finder window, although I forget when the element was introduced. Knowing Apple, it was conceived at least five years prior to its implementation. (Note that the AIA did not go into effect until January 2014, making this stupid patent application part of the 'first-to-invent' era.)
i'm actually one of seven people worldwide that own the "offending" corel home office.
what to do.. what to do..
i think i'll just send microsoft this piece of shit software so corel can reduce the "damages" by 14.3 percent.
On what basis are trademarks more acceptable than design patents?
If you look at the full complaint, it's not just about the slider, it's a comprehensive look-and-feel lawsuit where it's clearly been copied: https://www.eff.org/files/2015...
What's more, the lawsuit appears to be in retaliation for a much more dangerous utility patent telling Microsoft they can't include a live preview in their office products:
http://www.fosspatents.com/201...
I would not include software design patents in a blog covering software utility patents. There's just no comparison. By *definition*, a design patent covers things that don't objectively matter, and therefore they just aren't the same sort of problem. You can get stupid shit like suing over rounded edges of a cellphone in Samsung v. Apple, but it's ridiculous with software when it's a matter of moments to change all future copies, and patch any existing copies (that are receiving updates), to slightly alter the design to not infringe without in any way adjusting the functionality or the backing code.
Slider, n. A bowel movement that slides right out and is caused by eating greasy food. Originally, a derogatory term attributed to White Castle hamburgers. Now, the term is unwittingly embraced as mini-hamburgers on menus at White Castle, Chili's, Applebee's, TGI Friday's, Red Robin, etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I had sliders in some BASIC screen code I wrote back in the 1970s, and Bill Gates owes me a heck of a lot of money now.
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Can't patent what White Castle has been selling for decades
I think that's mustard.
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Also, I should point out we coded sliders into various military code, way before Bill Gates was even coding. He owes some of the first women software designers a HECK of a lot of money too.
Yes it had + and - symbols on the range. This means, since it was military code, that essentially sliders are PUBLIC DOMAIN.
No, you're not cleared to read the code. That's not my problem.
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Microsoft is weak. Regardless of all the billions of dollars they have and their dominance in the software they've released, they obviously feel threatened to patent and then sue over a tiny little slider in an app.
To the folks at Redmond:
Keep it up Microsoft. While you nickle and dime customers with outrageous licensing practices and then add telemetry on top of it, and while you extort as much money from the broken patent system as possible, your actions do not go unnoticed. Your actions are indicative of a company that so weak in innovating and putting out new products that you must resort to exploitative business practices that hurt consumers.
You have been able to get away with this for years so naturally you don't think there's anything wrong. However there is something wrong. Your customers aren't as dumb and helpless as you think they are. There are plenty of viable lower cost solutions to the products you sell and they get more popular every time you keep making life harder for your customers.