Microsoft patents CSS?

ewhac writes "In the current issue of The Bulletin (an email newsletter, pricey subscription required), it is reported that, in mid-January, Microsoft was awarded patent #5860073 on, "The use of style sheets in an electronic publishing system." The Seybold article casts doubt on the validity of the patent, citing prior art back to the 1960's, and on the competence of the US Patent and Trademark Office for awarding it. The article also calls Microsoft's motives into question for failing to mention this patent application to the World Wide Web Consortium, with whom it has been working for some time to develop a style sheet standard. Thomas Reardon, director of standards at Microsoft, claims that it will offer a "free and reciprocal" license to anyone wishing to use the technology, adding, "These are the most liberal licensing terms out there." (It would seem Reardon is not aware of the GPL.) "

Comments

One More Thing...

[ewhac]

The Bulletin article also calls on Microsoft to turn the patent over to the W3C, and relinquish all claims to the "technology."

Clearly, more than just us geeks are getting sick to the teeth of bogus patents.

Schwab

...and thanks for all the fish.

[deusx]

"The article also calls Microsoft's motives into question for failing to mention this patent application to the World Wide Web Consortium, with whom it has been working for some time to develop a style sheet standard."

Of course... I see now. Let's work with an open standards body, let them do the bulk of the work in hashing out the details, we'll let everyone else start using it, then we'll implement it and patent it and drink champaign to toast all that good will effort making us money now. Oh yeah, and we won't charge them that much to use the tech they've given us.

Jeeeeesus! "The Seybold article casts doubt on the... competence of the US Patent and Trademark Office for awarding it."

No kidding! Seeing more and more stories like this popping up everyday, such as the possibility to create an entire business model around patenting and litigating against commonly used open technology...

Is there anyway someone can sue this bunch of gov't numbskulls to either give it up, or if we can't get rid of patents like that, at least get their acts together? Wouldn't it be smarter to have industry-specific patent awarding groups rather than a monolithic gov't body??

Patents + Micro$oft = /. flamefest

[Cid Highwind]

We get to slam Micro$oft AND the US Patent office at the same time? Sound the fire alarms!

Patent office

[Raindog]

I certainly agree with people that the patent office has made a huge number of really stupid decisions lately....but keep in mind everything that they have to keep track of that gets patented, and how fast the tech industry in general moves. Certainly changes need to be made to allow them to work effectivly in this intense enviroment, but just keep in mind the enormity of the task they have to undertake. Its easier to criticize than understand, unfortunely, the only way to truely fix something is to understand it first. Cheers.

Brian

The tip of the iceberg...

[Your own stupidity]

If you really want to be outraged, you should go to IBM's patent search, set the search word to Microsoft, and the collection to U.S. Inventors & Companies. You'll get almost 800. You'll get 20 for just the last three months.

(Sorry, I tried a URL-encoded request, but they make it much more difficult than it has to be, probably for this very reason.)