You're still not getting it. Syncing is not the same thing. Sending the actual files is not what the patent does.
The patent covers, sending a list of versions of files to a server, the server goes through it's archive and determines which files are out of date. Then it sends a list of those files, including summaries of what the files are, etc.. to the client so that this list can be displayed to the user, then that user can decide if he wants install any given update.
So, rather than syncing files, it actually says "Blah.dll" was updated in service pack 3, therefore to update that file you need to download and install service pack 3.
This is not the same thing. Inarguably, rsync does a lot more, it just doesn't do what the patent we're referring to does, and no matter how you wish to twist it, it's not the same thing.
It's like claiming that a semi truck is the same thing as a Jaguar XK8 because they can both get you from point a to b.
You really don't understand what that meeting was about. Microsoft was most likely trying to get a cross licensing deal, and if you read between the lines, that's most likely exactly what happened.
Microsoft has been doing that for years, going to companies and saying "You violate our patents, what have you got for us" and the answer is usually "Well, how about we give you the right to use our patents, you give us the right to use yours", shake hands and walk away.
However, If you ask any professional in the field how to achieve a task and they come up with a solution and implement it, and use it without a second thought thinking "This is too obvious to patent", not realizing that M$ had in fact patented the technology already, then perhaps the patent is over-broad and/or too obvious to patent.
Or maybe you saw it in a microsoft product, maybe not even realizing it, and your subconscious now "invented" it.
It's hard to tell. It takes years to process and get a patent accepted. If you just implemented something you feel is obvious, and there is already a patent on it, that means the concept has been out there for at least 5 or 10 years, making your claims of obviousness biased.
The question is, did you invent it without any knowledge (consciously or subconsciously) of the other work.
Wrong. Most people who claim prior art for something tend to only look at very superficial details. The geniisoft link for instance only shows tabbed toolbars. That's not what makes the ribbon innovative. The ribbon builds it's UI dynamically, and interactively. If you have a smaller screen, it resizes the elements and relays them out, for instance. It also does live previews of how applying the items in the ribbon will affect your document. If you have access to Office 2007 or 2010, try something. Resize the window down to a much smaller size.. pay close attention to the ribbon while you do it. It's really quite interesting.
It's always the people that don't actually *USE* something that seem to claim how it's just like something else that it isn't like at all, other than perhaps a visual similarity.
Stop believing every website that claims prior art. Use some critical thinking, and think for yourself.
You seem to misunderstand what is being asked. This was not about syncing two files, it was doing the specific functionality, which was going to a server, retrieving a list of updates given a list of files and versions. Then providing that list.
Yes, I did use google. It's very obscure and there exist very few relative links even when adding "sector software" to the search criteria. and it turns out, it was just a TSR like all those others. This is not the same thing.
You glossed over the "not the first to do it, just the first to use a piece of clipart" part (paraphased)
You glossed over the "it does more than you claim it does" part. You're using a ridiculous argument, and not coincidentally, it's the same argument most people who criticize software patents use.. focusing on a tiny portion of functionality and ignoring the rest.
The ribbon doesn't merely hide toolbars that are not useful in a given context. Hell, Word did that going back years. The ribbon is entirely context driven, it builds the toolbars dynamically given the current context. It does live previews of how clicking on buttons will affect your document just by hovering over it, just to name a few of it's features.
By the way, care to explain how Microsoft could have claimed that Windows 95 was the first 32 bit PC operating system when Microsoft themselves had created Windows NT (a 32 bit PC operating system) several years earlier?
I think you're still making things up, and attributing them to Microsoft to "prove" your point.
I might stop believing marketing hype if the hype you claim i'm believing actually existed.
The only word processor Corel had was WordPerfect, and it did NOT do what the Ribbon does. The fact that you can't actually point out any specific thing, just vague hand waving is evidence enough that you're talking out of your ass.
Regarding COM, you seem to be confusing when a product shipped with when it was created. OS/2 2.0 and OS/2 1.3 were done by IBM yes, and COM was released as a product in 1993 (OLE 2 in 1992), but the actual technology was created by Microsoft in 1987, with white papers written in 1998 and 1990.
COM was not originally a product, but was the basis of OLE 2. It existed for several years before OLE did, and the basic concepts were drawn from whitepapers by Antony Williams in 1998 and 1990.
All of this predated OS/2 2.0 by a great deal, and while betas of OS/2 2.0 were in existence in 1990, the workplace shell and SOM were not.
WPS didn't even appear in betas until sometime around late 1991 (after Windows 3.1 and OLE 2 betas were already shipping)
It's relatively easy to know this because SOM is based on CORBA, and COM and CORBA came out about the same time. CORBA was an RPC based technology while COM was a function dispatch based technology. COM and CORBA came at the same problem from opposite sides, and eventually met in the middle with CORBA moving from distributed objects towards component objects and COM moving from component to distributed.
done better by others before. Or do you think the fact that they call it "The Ribbon" is the innovation part of mangling an idea others already had?
Saying it does not prove it. Show me the prior art. Bear in mind that merely being a tabbed toolbar doesn't make it the same thing. The Ribbon's functionality is what makes it innovative, not the fact that it has tabs.
Regarding Photosynth, All new ideas are based on research of others. Newton said something about standing on the shoulders of giants, doesn't make his work any less innovative. Photosynth, as a product, was highly innovative.
it was to catch up with IBM and OS/2
Are you fucking kidding me? OS/2 was created by Microsoft and IBM together. Microosft wrote nearly all of OS/2 up until OS/2 1.3, and COM and OLE goes back to 1987, the same year OS/2 was released *WITHOUT A GUI OF ANY KIND*.
Wow, you are ignorant of history. Wow, that's just plain stupid.
And Xeros Star had nothing like COM or OLE. It's object embedding technolgy was entirely different.
Even if they were first, it doesnt count because it would actually have to work first
Now you're just being stupid. Of course it works. Just because it can't protect from every possible exploit doesn't make it useless or "non working". By that argument, just because someone can root a unix box, that means all of it's security doesn't work.
Wow, I just can't believe what passes for logic these days.
Given that both menus via HTML5 canvas tag and menus via SVG already exist, there's prior art.. and lots of it. So you wouldn't be able to get a valid patent on it.
I agree the the 768 patent is pretty vague, and probably would not stand up to scrutiny, but given that it was filed in 1996 by Silicon Graphics, and awarded to them (before Microsoft bought the patent as part of a patent portfolio sale) I wouldn't blame Microsoft for it. SGI patented it.
(wow, that's innovation... someone else's idea - with a piece of clipart)
You show a fundamental lack of knowledge of what you're actually talking about. Assistants weren't simply animated ways to access help text, they could actually analyze what you're doing and supply recommendations. That was innovative. Annoying, but innovative.
Which still confuses users of older versions of Office to this day
What part of "Whether you like the idea or not" don't you understand? You or anyone else liking the idea has no bearing on its novelty.
You don't do your argument any justice by making fallacial comments like this.
which was an idea long since in existence in the Xerox Star systems
The star had document embedding, but it wasn't live document embedding. You couldn't edit documents in place, and you couldn't update the document elsewhere and have it be updated in the embedded document.
Don't confuse "Someone once did something kind of like that" with lack of novelty. It's not just the base concept, it's the entire concept.
8 years after Spellbound came out
That's interesting, sicne I can find no reference to any word processor called Spellbound... And the only reference to a spell checker is the firefox extension, which certainly did not come out 8 years before Word 95.
I'm also suspect of your IBM reference, given that you seem to conflate way too many concepts to believe your arguments. Do you have a reference?
The question of novelty can be solved by whether two or more people independantly come up with the identical idea (not merely similar) without any knowledge of each others work (or anyone else with similar ideas).
Think about the wheel. If patents had been around when the wheel was invented, would the wheel be obvious? It certainly is to anyone today, and you can list lots of reasons why. But the wheel was probably based on rolling logs. Someone looking at a log on the ground and watching it roll around may or may not consider cutting it to create smaller logs to allow the transportation of heavy objects.
The telephone was not an obvious idea when invented, but yes, Bell made it to the patent office first.
In fact, your example proves my point. The telephone patent was a case where prior art existed, and the patent should not have been granted or should have been invalidated. It wasn't an "obvious" idea.
No, but my point is that if something is truly obvious, then prior art will exist. If, as you say, it should have been obvious, where is the prior art?
Possible invalidity of base claim: It is impossible to know, when beginning the application process and even at the time of patent issuance, if a patent claim is valid. This is because any publication dated before the application's priority date and published anywhere on earth in any language can invalidate the claim (excluding publications by the inventor published during the grace period in certain countries such as U.S., Canada and Japan). Furthermore, even applications that were not yet published at the time of filling, but have a priority date prior to the priority date of the application, can also invalidate the claim. As it is impossible to gain an absolute and complete knowledge of every publication on earth, not to mention unpublished patent applications, there is always some degree of uncertainty. If the independent claim is determined to be invalid, however, a dependent claim may nevertheless survive, and may still be broad enough to bar competitors from valuable commercial territory.
Yes and no. More specific claims are built upon less specific claims. The more general the claim, the more likely the claim is to not withstand a validity test.
So while claim 1 may not be valid as a patentable item, when claim 13 is based upon claim 12, based up upon 11, etc.. is.
For example, if you created a new mousetrap, and wanted to patent it, your claim 1 would probably sound a lot like every other mousetrap in existence, but your final claim would not.
I think they're depending on a large bias in the jury pool towards Microsoft, given that a large percentage of the population depends on them either directly or indirectly.
Microsoft sued TomTom over a range of patents, one of which was the FAT patent. It wasn't specifically about the FAT patent, and in reality, TomTom had threatened MS with patent suits first. Microsoft responded to the threats by actually filing a suit, effectively calling their bluff when they settled so fast after a feeble attempt to modify their original threatened suit to be a counter-suit. TomTom was no saint and had sued a half dozen other companies previously after shakedown attempts. They chose the wrong victim when they went after Microsoft.
This is, to my mind, the first time Microsoft has ever filed a truly offensive (as in offense, not offending) patent lawsuit. I have to think there's more to the story here than meets the eye. Microsoft is seeking injunctive relief, not damages. As such, they're not using this as a revenue model.
Also, the first claim is always the most general. The patent must take all claims into account, not just the first one. It's patenting everything together, not each indidvidually.
The problem with ideas is that they seem obvious in hindsight. Prior to that, clearly nobody had implemented it.. so the idea couldn't have been that obvious. Obvious ideas have lots of simultaneous prior art because, well, they're obvious..
The thing about knowledge is that if you know it, it's obvious. If you don't, it's not. 2+2 = 4 is obvious to us, but it wasn't before the invention of math. Hell, the concept of "0" seems obvious to us, but nobody figured it out for centuries after math was around until the Arabs thought of it.
The question is not "Is the idea obvious today, given hindsight". It's "Was the idea obvious when it was patented".
Laugh all you want, but office has had a number of innovative ideas, whether you like them or not. Assistants (ie. the universally despised clippy), The Ribbon, OLE integration of different kinds of docuemnts within a single document, OLE Automation control (Yes, we all know about ARexx capable word processors on the Amiga, but that was really only a tiny fraction of the capabilities that OLE automation exposes).. hell, Word was the first word processor to provide live spell-checking with the red squigglies.. (again, whether you like it or not.. lots of people do like the feature, lots don't).
Don't you think it's just as dishonest to claim there is no innovation when there is, as claming more innovation than there is?
Slashdot Mirror
And that difference is the basis for the patent. You seem to be glossing over that. "Well, the only difference is everything".
Yes, I get it. You love rsynch, it does all kinds of neat stuff. I agree. What it does NOT do is what the patent covers.
How about when the aliens land and say "Please die", how should you respond to that?
What if's are pointless.
You're still not getting it. Syncing is not the same thing. Sending the actual files is not what the patent does.
The patent covers, sending a list of versions of files to a server, the server goes through it's archive and determines which files are out of date. Then it sends a list of those files, including summaries of what the files are, etc.. to the client so that this list can be displayed to the user, then that user can decide if he wants install any given update.
So, rather than syncing files, it actually says "Blah.dll" was updated in service pack 3, therefore to update that file you need to download and install service pack 3.
This is not the same thing. Inarguably, rsync does a lot more, it just doesn't do what the patent we're referring to does, and no matter how you wish to twist it, it's not the same thing.
It's like claiming that a semi truck is the same thing as a Jaguar XK8 because they can both get you from point a to b.
You really don't understand what that meeting was about. Microsoft was most likely trying to get a cross licensing deal, and if you read between the lines, that's most likely exactly what happened.
Microsoft has been doing that for years, going to companies and saying "You violate our patents, what have you got for us" and the answer is usually "Well, how about we give you the right to use our patents, you give us the right to use yours", shake hands and walk away.
Or maybe you saw it in a microsoft product, maybe not even realizing it, and your subconscious now "invented" it.
It's hard to tell. It takes years to process and get a patent accepted. If you just implemented something you feel is obvious, and there is already a patent on it, that means the concept has been out there for at least 5 or 10 years, making your claims of obviousness biased.
The question is, did you invent it without any knowledge (consciously or subconsciously) of the other work.
Wrong. Most people who claim prior art for something tend to only look at very superficial details. The geniisoft link for instance only shows tabbed toolbars. That's not what makes the ribbon innovative. The ribbon builds it's UI dynamically, and interactively. If you have a smaller screen, it resizes the elements and relays them out, for instance. It also does live previews of how applying the items in the ribbon will affect your document. If you have access to Office 2007 or 2010, try something. Resize the window down to a much smaller size.. pay close attention to the ribbon while you do it. It's really quite interesting.
It's always the people that don't actually *USE* something that seem to claim how it's just like something else that it isn't like at all, other than perhaps a visual similarity.
Stop believing every website that claims prior art. Use some critical thinking, and think for yourself.
By your argument, all ideas are obvious. Ideas occur to someone to solve a problem. If someone comes up with an idea, it must be obvious.
What seperates an obvious idea from an inobvious one? If it wasn't obvious, how did the inventor come up with it?
You seem to misunderstand what is being asked. This was not about syncing two files, it was doing the specific functionality, which was going to a server, retrieving a list of updates given a list of files and versions. Then providing that list.
Rsync doesn't do that.
Yes, I did use google. It's very obscure and there exist very few relative links even when adding "sector software" to the search criteria. and it turns out, it was just a TSR like all those others. This is not the same thing.
You glossed over the "it does more than you claim it does" part. You're using a ridiculous argument, and not coincidentally, it's the same argument most people who criticize software patents use.. focusing on a tiny portion of functionality and ignoring the rest.
The ribbon doesn't merely hide toolbars that are not useful in a given context. Hell, Word did that going back years. The ribbon is entirely context driven, it builds the toolbars dynamically given the current context. It does live previews of how clicking on buttons will affect your document just by hovering over it, just to name a few of it's features.
By the way, care to explain how Microsoft could have claimed that Windows 95 was the first 32 bit PC operating system when Microsoft themselves had created Windows NT (a 32 bit PC operating system) several years earlier?
I think you're still making things up, and attributing them to Microsoft to "prove" your point.
I might stop believing marketing hype if the hype you claim i'm believing actually existed.
The only word processor Corel had was WordPerfect, and it did NOT do what the Ribbon does. The fact that you can't actually point out any specific thing, just vague hand waving is evidence enough that you're talking out of your ass.
Regarding COM, you seem to be confusing when a product shipped with when it was created. OS/2 2.0 and OS/2 1.3 were done by IBM yes, and COM was released as a product in 1993 (OLE 2 in 1992), but the actual technology was created by Microsoft in 1987, with white papers written in 1998 and 1990.
COM was not originally a product, but was the basis of OLE 2. It existed for several years before OLE did, and the basic concepts were drawn from whitepapers by Antony Williams in 1998 and 1990.
All of this predated OS/2 2.0 by a great deal, and while betas of OS/2 2.0 were in existence in 1990, the workplace shell and SOM were not.
WPS didn't even appear in betas until sometime around late 1991 (after Windows 3.1 and OLE 2 betas were already shipping)
It's relatively easy to know this because SOM is based on CORBA, and COM and CORBA came out about the same time. CORBA was an RPC based technology while COM was a function dispatch based technology. COM and CORBA came at the same problem from opposite sides, and eventually met in the middle with CORBA moving from distributed objects towards component objects and COM moving from component to distributed.
I point you to this article:
http://www.wincustomize.com/article/81265
In which, it says quite clearly that the reason for OS/2's delay from late 1991 to 1993 was WPS.
This message seems to indicate the first beta that included PWS was late 1991.
http://www.rusbasan.com/Humor/OS2_Dream.html
This infoworld article from July 1991 says that it didn't exist in the beta.
Saying it does not prove it. Show me the prior art. Bear in mind that merely being a tabbed toolbar doesn't make it the same thing. The Ribbon's functionality is what makes it innovative, not the fact that it has tabs.
Regarding Photosynth, All new ideas are based on research of others. Newton said something about standing on the shoulders of giants, doesn't make his work any less innovative. Photosynth, as a product, was highly innovative.
Are you fucking kidding me? OS/2 was created by Microsoft and IBM together. Microosft wrote nearly all of OS/2 up until OS/2 1.3, and COM and OLE goes back to 1987, the same year OS/2 was released *WITHOUT A GUI OF ANY KIND*.
Wow, you are ignorant of history. Wow, that's just plain stupid.
And Xeros Star had nothing like COM or OLE. It's object embedding technolgy was entirely different.
Now you're just being stupid. Of course it works. Just because it can't protect from every possible exploit doesn't make it useless or "non working". By that argument, just because someone can root a unix box, that means all of it's security doesn't work.
Wow, I just can't believe what passes for logic these days.
Given that both menus via HTML5 canvas tag and menus via SVG already exist, there's prior art.. and lots of it. So you wouldn't be able to get a valid patent on it.
I agree the the 768 patent is pretty vague, and probably would not stand up to scrutiny, but given that it was filed in 1996 by Silicon Graphics, and awarded to them (before Microsoft bought the patent as part of a patent portfolio sale) I wouldn't blame Microsoft for it. SGI patented it.
You show a fundamental lack of knowledge of what you're actually talking about. Assistants weren't simply animated ways to access help text, they could actually analyze what you're doing and supply recommendations. That was innovative. Annoying, but innovative.
What part of "Whether you like the idea or not" don't you understand? You or anyone else liking the idea has no bearing on its novelty.
You don't do your argument any justice by making fallacial comments like this.
The star had document embedding, but it wasn't live document embedding. You couldn't edit documents in place, and you couldn't update the document elsewhere and have it be updated in the embedded document.
Don't confuse "Someone once did something kind of like that" with lack of novelty. It's not just the base concept, it's the entire concept.
That's interesting, sicne I can find no reference to any word processor called Spellbound... And the only reference to a spell checker is the firefox extension, which certainly did not come out 8 years before Word 95.
I'm also suspect of your IBM reference, given that you seem to conflate way too many concepts to believe your arguments. Do you have a reference?
What part of "whether you like it or not" don't you understand? An idea doesn't have to be liked or even good to be novel.
The question of novelty can be solved by whether two or more people independantly come up with the identical idea (not merely similar) without any knowledge of each others work (or anyone else with similar ideas).
Think about the wheel. If patents had been around when the wheel was invented, would the wheel be obvious? It certainly is to anyone today, and you can list lots of reasons why. But the wheel was probably based on rolling logs. Someone looking at a log on the ground and watching it roll around may or may not consider cutting it to create smaller logs to allow the transportation of heavy objects.
You're confusing obviousness with theft of idea.
The telephone was not an obvious idea when invented, but yes, Bell made it to the patent office first.
In fact, your example proves my point. The telephone patent was a case where prior art existed, and the patent should not have been granted or should have been invalidated. It wasn't an "obvious" idea.
No, but my point is that if something is truly obvious, then prior art will exist. If, as you say, it should have been obvious, where is the prior art?
As an example, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claim_(patent)
Yes and no. More specific claims are built upon less specific claims. The more general the claim, the more likely the claim is to not withstand a validity test.
So while claim 1 may not be valid as a patentable item, when claim 13 is based upon claim 12, based up upon 11, etc.. is.
For example, if you created a new mousetrap, and wanted to patent it, your claim 1 would probably sound a lot like every other mousetrap in existence, but your final claim would not.
I think they're depending on a large bias in the jury pool towards Microsoft, given that a large percentage of the population depends on them either directly or indirectly.
Microsoft sued TomTom over a range of patents, one of which was the FAT patent. It wasn't specifically about the FAT patent, and in reality, TomTom had threatened MS with patent suits first. Microsoft responded to the threats by actually filing a suit, effectively calling their bluff when they settled so fast after a feeble attempt to modify their original threatened suit to be a counter-suit. TomTom was no saint and had sued a half dozen other companies previously after shakedown attempts. They chose the wrong victim when they went after Microsoft.
This is, to my mind, the first time Microsoft has ever filed a truly offensive (as in offense, not offending) patent lawsuit. I have to think there's more to the story here than meets the eye. Microsoft is seeking injunctive relief, not damages. As such, they're not using this as a revenue model.
Also, the first claim is always the most general. The patent must take all claims into account, not just the first one. It's patenting everything together, not each indidvidually.
The problem with ideas is that they seem obvious in hindsight. Prior to that, clearly nobody had implemented it.. so the idea couldn't have been that obvious. Obvious ideas have lots of simultaneous prior art because, well, they're obvious..
The thing about knowledge is that if you know it, it's obvious. If you don't, it's not. 2+2 = 4 is obvious to us, but it wasn't before the invention of math. Hell, the concept of "0" seems obvious to us, but nobody figured it out for centuries after math was around until the Arabs thought of it.
The question is not "Is the idea obvious today, given hindsight". It's "Was the idea obvious when it was patented".
Actually, I can't think of a single software vendor that was doing what Windows Update did in 1995. Can you?
Laugh all you want, but office has had a number of innovative ideas, whether you like them or not. Assistants (ie. the universally despised clippy), The Ribbon, OLE integration of different kinds of docuemnts within a single document, OLE Automation control (Yes, we all know about ARexx capable word processors on the Amiga, but that was really only a tiny fraction of the capabilities that OLE automation exposes).. hell, Word was the first word processor to provide live spell-checking with the red squigglies.. (again, whether you like it or not.. lots of people do like the feature, lots don't).
Don't you think it's just as dishonest to claim there is no innovation when there is, as claming more innovation than there is?