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Microsoft Seeks Latitude/Longitude Patent
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Feb 06, 2005 10:24 AM
from the definition-of-silly-pattents dept.
from the definition-of-silly-pattents dept.
theodp writes "Q. What does Microsoft feel is unpatentable? A. Apparently nothing! On Thursday, the USPTO published Microsoft's patent application for the Compact text encoding of latitude/longitude coordinates, in which the software giant explains how a floating-point number can also be represented as a less-precise integer that's displayed in base-30 notation!" If ever I have seen a silly patent, this is it.
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Is it entirely MS's fault? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty sure the US Patent Office has a say in what is and isn't patentable.
As Well, M$ is Not Stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Although M$ churns out mundane but fairly good software as the main line of business, this company has a huge R&D budget, and the central research laboratory at M$ is the equivalent of the old Bell Laboratory. I suspect that the M$ laboratory is not confined to only software research. There is likely small, upstart efforts exploring other technologies.
Certainly, X-Box took me by surprise as, up to its debut, I had always thought of M$ as a software company.
May be, there is something to the warning: "Resistance [in any technology] is future. You will be assimilated."
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Re:As Well, M$ is Not Stupid (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:As Well, M$ is Not Stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody did this before (so far as I know, not having checked) because nobody needed it before. Nobody figured that URLs which included
Re:As Well, M$ is Not Stupid (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Is it entirely MS's fault? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh really? I beg to differ. I've come across a couple fun examples recently
Method of Swinging on a Swing [uspto.gov].
Gee, I wouldn't have thought of that one! I think I heard somewhere that this patent was granted to a 5-year-old? 0_o
Method of Exercising a Cat (with a laser pointer...) [uspto.gov]
Here's a nice little read on the US Patent System that was in IEEE Spectrum a couple months ago. The US Patent System sucks ass [ieee.org]
So you see, the US Patenting Office appears to patent just about everything. Oh no, I hope they haven't patented my favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches...!
Patent 5,567,454 [uspto.gov]
Patent 5,855,939 [uspto.gov]
Patent RE37,275 [uspto.gov]
OH NOES!!!!
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Re:Is it entirely MS's fault? (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously that is prior art, but the whole point of his post is that the patent office has completely stopped caring about such things.
Re:Is it entirely MS's fault? (Score:5, Funny)
Since you can't read:
Holy shit "black pages" I didn't know you were a higher authority than both a published Dean and a published Professor at Harvard. I'm totally putting you on my "friends list" because you are the obvious expert when it comes to patent law and its intersection with Economics and Business.
While we're giving full disclosure, what are your credentials? They don't appear to be listed on your user profile.
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Re:Is it entirely MS's fault? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nonsense.
You are correct in asserting that the USPTO makes money from issance - as per their fee schedule [uspto.gov], they get $300 (plus extra fees for various things like multiple independent claims) when the app is filed, and $1,400 when it issues.
But the examiners - the people who make the allow-vs-reject decision - aren't responsible for the fiscal well-being of the USPTO. Were that the case, virtually every application would slide through to issuance with barely any examination. We'd be back to the patent registration scheme of the early 1800's, where you got a patent simply by filling out the right paperwork.
We don't have that system - in name or in practice. The examiners do a hell of a lot of rejecting, with backing references to other patents, journal articles, etc. They don't have the resources for an exhaustive search - but the typical application garners at least two separate rejections from the examiners.
But this is a classic catch-22 example: people often examiners for spending too much time on examination, and thereby contributing to the 2.5-year average pendency of patent applications.
- David Stein
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Re:Is it entirely MS's fault? (Score:3, Insightful)
Those are all logic
Ha (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there prior art? Probably.
Is it obvious?
Probably.
Is it capable of winning a course case? AAHAHAHAHAHAAHAA!!!
End of story.
Re:Ha (Score:3, Insightful)
With the justice system, you can never [overlawyered.com] be too sure.
Re:Ha (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Ha (Score:5, Informative)
"It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith."
Latitude and Longitude are normally expressed as base sixty rationals, so changing to base thirty integers isn't particularly innovative. This would never win a court case strictly; however, Microsoft has the money to keep this in court all the way to the U.S. Supreme court, so it would take a large amount of money to contest.
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Re:Ha (Score:3, Insightful)
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Jeez.... (Score:3, Funny)
Wait... maybe they will...
Honestly, they CAN, so they DO (Score:4, Insightful)
Bogus patent (Score:3, Interesting)
So, they remove the ability for a human to tell what the lat/long is by inspecting the string, but compress the string suboptimally? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Isn't this math? (Score:4, Interesting)
RTFP! (Score:3, Informative)
tinifying the URL? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Methods are disclosed for encoding latitude/longitude coordinates within a URL in a relatively compact form. The method includes converting latitude and longitude coordinates from floating-point numbers to non-negative integers."
Where are tinyurl [tinyurl.com] and similar websites to claim that they have been converting URLs to relatively-compact-form, using non-negative integers and letters?
From the patent text: (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, that is SO "politically correct". Still it does't prevent people from constructing URLs saying fvck 0ff. It would be better if people would simply learn to respect other peoples freedom of speech.
Preventing 3rd party/OSS interoperability (Score:5, Insightful)
After patenting this encoding method, they can create some kind of software interface based on it, e.g. have a web application that uses this encoding in it's URLs, or an extension to Internet Explorer that uses the encoding somehow. Then if the server/extension becomes popular, they can use the patent to lock out OSS and other vendor's applications.
Location-awareness is a hot topic these days -- that probably has something to do with this particular patent.
Real reason to prevent linking? (Score:5, Insightful)
Jolyon
The Point: URLs (Score:5, Insightful)
That's useful in mobile devices, where URLs are limited. It's also useful in that now you might be able to memorize and type in your latitude/longitude, since in a higher base (30 is just an example) you can get good precision in few digits (their example is 5 characters, with 2-meter precision).
Why base 30? That's 10 digits and 26 letters, minus 6 vowels "to avoid the possibility of the algorithm inadvertently generating real words that could be offensive". Funny.
So it's useful. As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel. Those are the three tests of a patent. If you don't want to use it, keep using base 10. If you do want to use it, at least give Microsoft credit for coming up with a reasonably clever idea. As another poster pointed out, this is the type of patent MS usually uses defensively, so that nobody goes out and patents an idea they're already using in live software.
I think MS would like to see everybody memorize the lat-lon of their home as two five-digit strings, but it's not going to happen. First of all, the patent requires you to pick a precision beforehand; decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds don't require that. Second, even if MS introduced a standard, they'd better release the patent for public use, or nobody will bother lest they risk being sued. Decimals are wordy, but everybody understands them and they're free.
I have one other gripe about the patent. They spend considerable time explaining how to convert a number in base 10 to a number in base N. It's not one of the claims, and it really could have been taken as given.
Re:The Point: URLs (Score:5, Funny)
B00BZB4BY.
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Re:The Point: URLs (Score:5, Insightful)
> done it before, which makes it both non-obvious
> and novel. Those are the three tests of a patent.
Whoa, wait a minute. I agree it's useful (though the reason for choosing base 30 is indeed funny).
It is *not* novel or non-obvious. Anyone who has ever seen various forms of primitive compression, as well as most people with common sense, could easily have come up with this.
Patents are meant for the kind of really intelligent stuff that requires hard research work. This is not such an idea.
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Not done before doesn't mean it isn't obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
MS aren't introducing a standard, quite the reverse - they are trying to prevent people interoperating with their servers.
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Re:The Point: URLs (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:The Point: URLs (Score:3, Insightful)
The patent covers *every* value of N, including 10. Under this patent you are no longer allowed to convert a "geographically-oriented number" into a decimal (or binary) integer representation.
"Decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds don't require [picking a precision beforehand]."
They do exactly that -- it's a base ten integer, a base sixty integer, and then a base sixty real.
Re:The Point: URLs (Score:3, Insightful)
A patent is "stronger" prior art than a journal publication. It shouldn't be, but it is.
If somebody else were to patent it, or worse patent a similar and overlapping idea, it would take MS considerable effort and court time to prove that it had prior art. They may be hoping to forestall th
I think there's prior art (Score:3, Interesting)
Second, I think there's prior art possibly in the universe simulator Celestia which supports URL encoding of coordinates (I don't know if it's uses the lat/long system though, that's why I'm bit unsure), and there definitely seem to be prior art in NASA's World Wind application. It uses a compact Lat/Long => URL encoding scheme as follows:
How to avoid infringement of this patent (Score:3, Insightful)
So, you can avoid infringement of this patent by using conversion to ISO-8859-1. Or perhaps a new patent, anyone? Just leave ISO-8859-2 for me, please.
If I understand it (Score:5, Informative)
0392670 and 1416000, seven digits each. You concatenate them together in a base-N alphabet. So if in base ten you have 03926701416000, nothing gained except I would like to know what is at that digit of pi maybe but no real use regarding the patent.
You could use a websafe alphabet (like I use when encrypting form data between one page and the next, based on a public CPAN module.. encryptform or some such) or a little bigger alphabet that would be MIME or Base64.
From item 8 they are dropping accuracy in order to encode in less characters. Um. Well yes you can shorten numbers to lose accuracy. If you write the numbers using letters instead, like in base 16 or some substitution alphabet it may look like you are shortening a word but really it is just dropping decimal places. Microsoft claims they are unique at being able to go back and forth between string length and allowable error. They have a patented subroutine that you feed say a floating point latitude, number of characters to use, the number of characters in the alphabet (i.e. the base) and required accuracy, and it will spit back something like "KXW" maybe.
Likewise you can feed another patented subroutine "KXWCMY" and it will give you back something like "39.3N, 142E" (well higher res than that really, it doesn't seem that useful unless you are measuring GPS coords to the inch). Perhaps this is the code a mobile device will shout whenever it can triangulate its location from a few known wifi points. :)
Well I just skimmed the end of it but it seems this is for use when you really don't want to use all those decimal places (8 digits for meter resolution). Needless to say 32 bits is enough to handle it but it looks so *long*! So instead of just lopping off the last few digits, they want to compress it (okay so far) but then they tell the compression algorithm how compressed they want the string to be, how much they are willing to give up (I would think in decimal places but ultimately in meters I suppose).
They then talk about personal info managers and map display programs on pdas, and the bs starts to pile up real fast. They start talking about nonvolatile memory, video tape, scanners, joysticks, office environments, what have you.
There is mention of an URL (301) that 'contains a geographic parameter "mapcoord", which has a parameter value "ry7cx4tp95"'. There is some talk about users inputting information which sounds interesting, until you realize that in the end this is really a quintessential rot13 for the 21st century, written by a corporation that does not care if users cannot decipher the codes or tell how accurate it is at a glance, or find it on a globe or non-M$ map, that assumes every gps manufacturer will liscense the patent, who cares if you don't have alpha input on your keypad etc. Someone should tell them you could do it all in just a couple characters on a kanji-equipped Japanese phone. While it gets more seductive as you read more and more, it also hits you with a sledgehammer that you have to have a calculator with the patented subroutines built into it, just to understand what codes your are typing.. it can only ever be useful among a weenies who have been brainwashed to think in corporate speak and that is the problem with Microsoft and Windows. If they just published it for free openly most people would forget it (it seems neat maybe but in the end it's just too much trouble unless it is an accepted standard like geo8 for an 8 letter string.. and even then). As it is I think it is utterly disgusting. Also it is probably beaten by error checking code, lossy image compression code, and the CPAN module I mentioned. Yuck!
US Government missed its own prior art (Score:4, Informative)
See this description of GEOREF co-ordinates [fas.org] for example. Basically you divvy the world up in to a grid and use letters to reference the major fractions of the co-ordinates and numbers the minor fractions. So 106 25' 44" W 310 48' 06" N becomes EJPB 3448.
Give me a break. (Score:5, Insightful)
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have done a pretty good job establishing and maintaining desktop and office suite dominance.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have made a pretty big warchest of cash.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have gone from nothing to second place in the game console market rather quickly.
For a "bunch of morons," in other words, they're pretty damned successful. The last thing you or anyone should be doing is writing them off.
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Re:Base 30?!? That's the silly part (Score:3, Funny)
Sheesh, the lack of humor displayed on Slashdot knows no bounds.
Re:On the bright side... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Don't be a fool (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't you find it more believable that they are simply waiting for software patents to be established world wide, after which they'll take out all the major open source applications? I.e. Samba, Apache, Open Office, Mozilla, maybe gcc, etc.
Re:Don't be a fool (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it helps that the junk they're patenting has no actual value. I don't think Linux will be crippled by the inability to use an ISNOT operator in their BASIC compilers. :shakes head: Woodcock Washburn (the typically excellent law firm that drafted that patent application) should the hang its head in shame over that one.
I'm a patent attorney. More specifically, I'm a software patent attorney, and I truly believe that allowing patents for truly useful novel algorithms is a boon for the industry. But I feel that the quality of many software patents is an embarrassment to the field. Worse, it's an embarrassment to the patentee: it's a sign that they have no ability to evaluate the usefulness of their software - no talent to determine which pieces of their products are both new and critically important.
But the /. community should be glad about one thing: As long as Microsoft's choices of technologies to patent remain befuddled, it won't be able to tap the true, strong, monopoly-cementing power of software patents.
- David Stein
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Re:Don't be a fool (Score:3, Interesting)
What I mean is that this patent will probably never ever end up in court, but it will most certainly end up in a "Linux violates 953292493294 patents" statistic.
Re:Don't be a fool (Score:4, Funny)
Every patent I am aware of has only been used for litigation.
(oh, you must mean for the legal industry)
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Re:Don't be a fool (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay - RSA encryption. [uspto.gov] This novel encryption method is the mathematical basis for most encrypted web browser communication. Without such a technique, most of e-commerce would be untenable - either the encryption mechanism would be prohibitively cumbersome, or it would be riddled with holes.
This algorithm wasn't created in the vacuum of academia. It was developed as a way of allowing easy, encrypted communication among businesses. Without a business incentive to develop it - i.e., if other companies had been permitted to just steal the technology after it was created - no one would have created it.
So what happened once it was patented? Did the company take on the Darth-Vader-esque visage that most Slashdotters imagine? No, it had the good business judgment to promote RSA across the board, and to reap a reasonable profit through licensing to big companies like Verisign. The industry didn't grind to a halt.
And what would have happened without a strong, business-savvy proponent of RSA? Internet technology in general is a hideous swamp of competing standards and compatibility issues. Ask any web developer how much time they spend on IE/Firefox/Netscape/Opera compatibility issues, or on Java version compatibility, or on security issues between or among various technologies and standards. It's insanity. The explosion of web development has occurred not because of these myriad and disparate technologies, in spite of them.
Yet, in the midst of this sea of chaos, encryption technology just magically seems to work - automatically, unobtrusively, without a security update every 25 seconds. That technology works. I assert that this is because we gave one company some breathing room to develop it.
- David Stein
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Re:Don't be a fool (Score:3, Insightful)
This had two basic results: (1) much of the development work in employing RSA for practical purposes, particularly in open-source software, was done
Re:Don't be a fool (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm willing to grant that sometimes software patents can motivate innovation. It is certainly the case that making money is a major motivation for people (though not everyone) and in some cases, such as the RSA example, it is arguably true that this motivation would have been absent without patents and that the technology might not have developed as soon or as well as it did without them.
My concern is that in many cases software patents seem to have the opposite effect, as many people have argued. It se
Re:Don't be a fool (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a relief (in this forum), though I'd encourage you to upgrade this to "often." Consider that you rarely hear about the software patents that are good and productive - they're not as newsworthy as "Amazon patents OneClick, oh no!"
It is certainly the case that making money is a major motivation for people (though not everyone)...
"Making money" has such a bad taste to it, doesn't it?
Money derived from commercial sofware doesn't go (100%) into the pockets of a greedy CEO. Much of it goes simply to pay the salaries of the programmers, and the operating costs of the business. I harbor the overly idealistic, probably naive view that professional programmers are motivated by (1) the desire to create cool sofware and (2) a deep-seated love of programming. They can only pursue those goals if they get a paycheck.
Sometimes, a patent is needed to secure the business capital to create this environment. That's where business realities, like patents, become important.
My concern is that in many cases software patents seem to have the opposite effect, as many people have argued.
I completely share your concern. Any time someone sucessfully patents an old or silly computing concept, it drags down everything.
But I attribute it to the infancy of the software patent field. People are still floundering with this new concept, what it can accomplish, how it should be used. Over time, sofware business people become more familiar with the nature of patents - and patent attorneys become more familiar with the nature of software. There will be a focusing of the field on truly useful and worthwhile software patents. Anything else - patenting ISNOT, for example - is simply a waste of everyone's time, money, and reputation.
That is, it isn't by any means the only kind of encryption available, so for many purposes one could avoid the patent by using a different encryption scheme.
Absolutely. In fact, the RSA patent encourages competing software companies to find alternative methods. Maybe those methods will be better - more secure, less computationally taxing, offering features not found in RSA, etc. - and they'll separately patent and commercialize their better algorithm. Encouraging competition and "designing-around" has always been a goal of the patent system.
It isn't clear to me whether there is a reasonable way to permit software patents in the cases in which they might be desirable and to exclude them in other cases.
Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's also pretty subjective, though. At least I can offer this: All patents - good and bad - expire 20 years after filing. That's an eternity in the software industry (though it's much less offensive than the copyright industry's "life of the author + 70-95 years" schtick), but at least it's a backstop time limit to really egregious conduct.
- David Stein
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Re:Don't be a fool (Score:5, Interesting)
You can read about the patent and its problems in this nice article in cyberlaw [cyberlaw.com]. I would like to add a few things though, regarding the industry reaction to the patent.
In '95 computers were already fast enough to handle secure-only communications, but the existence of this particular patent was a big problem for most of the new and small web companies (and users). And make no mistake, RSA really enforced this patent, they didn't play Mr. nice guy, if that is what you thought. So the majority of web sites, did not serve encrypted pages, the majority of emails are not encrypted (even today), and most of electronic devices have no such support.
To be fair, the patent did create a new market: a few companies selling "security" profited from this. RSA too. The industry as a whole didn't.
Internet naturally did not die from this patent (as the patent was not broad enough to cover non-secure communication as well) , but online security definetely took a major hit.
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Re:Don't be a fool (Score:4, Insightful)
You must be unfamiliar with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 - in which the government encourages recipients of government funding to do exactly this. I don't believe that something the government encourages people do with government property can be construed as "theft."
(True, the RSA patent predates the Bayh-Dole Act, but there's no evidence of anything inappropriate in its patenting. You'll have to point to something particular in its history - and I don't believe any such backstory exists.)
It looks like you're relying on the general concept of patenting government-funded inventions. You must be unaware that the government has a hideous track record of commercializing its own technologies. Before the Bayh-Dole Act, the government retained ownership of vast and sundry technologies - which, as it happened, sat on a shelf completely unused. They had no commercial proponent, and so they were never used.
Your principle ignores the realities of business. Software is primarily a business - even the open-source kind. This is understandable; most Slashdotters know computers much better than business. Just be aware that virtually all of the software on your computer was written in a business context, and that the realities of commerce might play an important role.
- David Stein
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Re:Don't be a fool (Score:5, Insightful)
The inherent value in ISNOT is that Microsoft's Basic (the defacto standard used by the vast majority of Basic programmers) supports it. With this patent, other Basic implementations will be forbidden from supporting it. Only Microsoft will be able to produce Basic interpreters that are fully compatible with Microsoft's implementation.
Just like with browsers and web pages, most developers will casually use whatever features Microsoft gives them by default. Thus, it will not be possible for Linux to reliably run Basic code developed for Microsoft platforms without somebody going through the source to manually remove all ISNOTs. This barrier to entry into the market for the most popular RAD language environment in the business world can be extremely valuable to Microsoft, and it could effectively cripple Linux-based attempts to provide a competing platform for hosting business apps written in VB.
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Re:Prior Art? Natural Area Codes (Score:4, Interesting)
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