IBM Gets a Patent On 'Out-of-Office' Email Messages -- In 2017 (arstechnica.com)

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued IBM a -- what the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls -- "stupefyingly mundane" patent on e-mail technology. U.S. Patent No. 9,547,842, "Out-of-office electronic mail messaging system" was filed in 2010 and granted about six weeks ago. Ars Technica reports: The "invention" represented in the '842 patent is starkly at odds with the real history of technology, accessible in this case via a basic Google search. EFF lawyer Daniel Nazer, who wrote about the '842 patent in this month's "Stupid Patent of the Month" blog post, points to an article on a Microsoft publicity page that talks about quirky out-of-office e-mail culture dating back to the 1980s, when Microsoft marketed its Xenix e-mail system (the predecessor to today's Exchange.) IBM offers one feature that's even arguably not decades old: the ability to notify those writing to the out-of-office user some days before the set vacation dates begin. This feature, similar to "sending a postcard, not from a vacation, but to let someone know you will go on a vacation," is a "trivial change to existing systems," Nazer points out. Nazer goes on to identify some major mistakes made during the examination process. The examiner never considered whether the software claims were eligible after the Supreme Court's Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which came in 2014, and in Nazer's view, the office "did an abysmal job" of looking at the prior art. "[T]he examiner considered only patents and patent applications," notes Nazer. The office "never considered any of the many, many, existing real-world systems that pre-dated IBM's application."

Comments

An American patent?

[gtall]

Since when is IBM still an American company, they cannot seem to shed American workers fast enough. There are some jobs el Presidente Tweetie can save, convince Rometty that she really wants to hire Americans, watch her turn green.

Re:An American patent?

[The Real Dr John]

People need to complain and stop this nonsense. Patents and copyrights should expire at 20 years max. Maybe less. This stifles creativity and productivity, and has nothing to do with the original intent of protecting inventors and writers. It has to stop.

Re:An American patent?

[Midnight Thunder]

People need to complain and stop this nonsense. Patents and copyrights should expire at 20 years max. Maybe less. This stifles creativity and productivity, and has nothing to do with the original intent of protecting inventors and writers. It has to stop.

If an idea can be conceived in an hour and implemented in a under a month, then 20 years is far in excess of anything reasonable. This is part of the problem with software patents: many of the patents can be designed and implemented in less than a month. Contrast that to hardware, where the cycle can often closer to a year, or more, and many hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent, so an extended protection makes some sense to recoup R&D costs.

Re:An American patent?

[msauve]

It doesn't matter. The purpose of IP (in the US) is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

If a patent or copyright makes a reasonable profit during it's term, the intent of those exclusive rights is met. Beyond that, locking up IP impedes progress, since others can't freely build on the original. Disney built their business using the works of the bros. Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Kipling, etc., but now work diligently to steal our culture from us by preventing newcomers from doing similar.

There are very, very, few inventions or works which are created with an expectation of not making good profit in less than 20 years (or for copyright, 14 years, plus one extension if the author was still alive, which was the original copyright term - patents were a bit shorter in general). And if something is going to take that long to provide enough public benefit to make a profit, it's probably better to open it up to 3rd party improvement sooner, so there's an opportunity to make it better.