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IBM Patents Changing Color of E-Mail Text
Posted by
timothy
on Sat May 16, 2009 03:39 PM
from the how-very-precious dept.
from the how-very-precious dept.
theodp writes "Last week, the USPTO granted IBM a patent for its 'System and method for comprehensive automatic color customization in an email message based on cultural perspective.' So what exactly did the four Big Blue inventors come up with? IBM explains: 'For example, an email created in the US in red font to indicate urgency or emphasis might be mapped to a more appropriate color (e.g., blue or black) for sending to Korea.' IBM took advantage of the USPTO's Accelerated Examination Program to fast-track the patent's approval. BTW, if you missed the 2006 press release, IBM boasted it was 'holding itself to a higher standard than any law requires because it's urgent that patent quality is improved.'"
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great ideas make the world go round (Score:3, Funny)
Thanks to slashdot for highlighting one of the many great ideas that Big Blue has brought to our meager existences. It's things like color fonts in email that really put a smile on my face every day. I'm glad slashdot posts stories like this to remind us of who's behind some of the great ideas we use every day.
To celebrate this remarkable achievement I am going to send all my emails today using a Big Blue font.
Re: (Score:2)
No, no, dont do it! Your readers will just hate it... instead use comic sans with pink huge font!
For the chinese? (Score:2)
Last I've heard, pink is a lucky colour in China.
Re: communication barrier (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm.. so that's why Kim Jong-il doesn't respond to our urgent messages.
Parent
Well, fuck me over flying backwards . . . (Score:2, Funny)
. . . except that nobody will be able to read this post anyways, as that IBM thingie will present this text as "white on white."
Well I'll be dipped in dogshit... (Score:3, Funny)
hope they don't find out about using carbon paper (CC = carbon copy) to transfer a copy of the letter you're typing onto another document or i'll have to pay insane royalties each time i forward those dumb internet chain letters i send to over 9000 of my friends!!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This should be modded +1 Funny, because there is no way that this post can be serious. Writing a letter with a multi-color pens gives you a letter with multiple colors. When you send it to people with different cultural backgrounds, the colors of your letter don't automatically change so that they have the same cultural meaning for your recipients as they do for you. Maybe such a pen exists in the world of Harry
Re: (Score:2)
Writing a letter with a multi-color pens gives you a letter with multiple colors. When you send it to people with different cultural backgrounds, the colors of your letter don't automatically change so that they have the same cultural meaning for your recipients as they do for you. Maybe such a pen exists in the world of Harry Potter. But in the real world, this doesn't come even close to prior art that anticipates this invention.
But is Cascading Style Sheets prior art? You serve one stylesheet for web browsers set to Korean and another for web browsers set to a Latin-script language.
Re: (Score:2)
"hmmm, aren't those fat multi-color pens and multi-color typewriter ribbon evidence of prior art?"
Only if you somehow have magical ink that changes color depending on the country it is in.
Well, I'll be violated by a poopsicle... (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't Harry Potter evidence of prior art?
But... wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't we just tag the text with some kind of semantic markup, and then use some kind of "sheet of styles" that relate the markup to the appearance? Sound familiar?
Re: (Score:2)
Perfect idea! I just *want* more of those emails embedded inside bloat html for no reason!
But more on it, if you want to implement it on the normal text view, there's millions of email clients you would need to get to support it. And as far as HTML email goes, No Thanks.
Re:But... wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Perfect idea! I just *want* more of those emails embedded inside bloat html for no reason!
<x-html>
<!x-stuff-for-pete base="" src="" id="0" charset=""><DIV></DIV><w:fonts> <w:defaultFonts w:h-ansi="Times New Roman" w:cs="Times New Roman"/> </w:fonts> <w:docPr/> <w:body> <wx:sect> <w:p> <w:pPr/> <w:r> <w:rFonts w:h-ansi="Helvetica" w:cs="Helvetica"/>
<w:t>I agree.</w:t> </w:r> </w:p> <w:pgSz w:w="12240" w:h="15840"/> <w:pgMar w:top="1440" w:right="1440" w:bottom="1440" w:left="1440"/> </w:sectPr> </wx:sect> </w:body>
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Come on! In these times, this argument is completely and utterly outdated. And besides: The spammers do not care anyway.
No why not use HTML as it was intended: To mark-up hypertext.
You know, it's actually a cool and useful technology.
And there is not a single real-world e-mail client I know that still can't do basic HTML. Where do you live? in the 80s?
We techies usually aren't so conservative. So why here?
Examples for which HTML is good:
Re:But... wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
I prefer plain text because its 100x more secure than HTML with how its rendered. Theres various exploitable software and even drive-by-download exploits, and then you can use hotlinked images to track who reads emails (and spam them even more).
Yes, my email client supports html emails. It even has it enabled by default. But because of that, I changed it to show text version to me before and just when I click it will show me the html version
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm... Sure it adds some complexity. And complexity can add bugs. (But does not have to.)
But it is well worth it. Same as UTF-8.
If you fear exploitability then I ask you: Do you run Windows? A browser? A instant-messaging-client? (They transmit HTML too.)
A file sharing program? (Those things are always scanned for exploits. All the time.)
Do you use cracks off of sites like astalavista, gamecopyworld, or straigt out of the p2p nets?
If you at all do any of those things, then I think it's pretty much irrelevan
UTF-8 is disabled on purpose (5:erocS) (Score:2)
Slashdot is the only site I know that fails hard at UTF-8.
This is intentional. Slashdot is in English, and English requires no characters outside Latin-1 plus the € character. Slashdot used to allow more characters, but that was turned off on purpose due to abuse [slashdot.org].
Re: (Score:2)
We already do. The tags look like:
Priority: urgent
And then the receiving mail client displays it appropriately for the given locale/user.
In other words, prior art.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sound familiar?
Sure, sounds familiar. But that's not how IBM is doing it in this patent. Try reading it - they don't require any tags to be added to the text, or some "sheet of styles" to relate "markup" to anything. So, while your solution sounds quite familiar, it has nothing to do with this patent.
nice (Score:3, Insightful)
IMO this isn't such an bad way to do it. Might even be patent worthly as noone is doing it.
I myself really dislike stupid red fonts in emails or whatever *urgent* messages. I understand it by words anyways and it just makes me feel offended. But if its just cultural differences, then good job IBM.
Colour in email? (Score:5, Funny)
But who would see colour anyway? Is this another Windows thing?
Flamebait Summary (Score:2)
This seems like a perfectly reasonable, new idea. It's not "changing color of email text"... it's automatically understanding the meaning of the colors and adjusting them appropriately for each recipient.
Why is it that so many people on Slashdot seem to think that all patents are bad?
Why we think all or almost all s/w patents are bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Because most of them would take most competent software engineers about 5 minutes to think up themselves if presented with the problem that the patent claims to be a solution to.
The programmatic solution is often obvious from a routine logical analysis of the problem and its domain, and standard modelling techniques.
The examiners seem not to be able to have a proper idea of non-obviousness (to a practitioner in the field), when it comes to software patents.
This causes areas of software work to be unreasonably closed off to any reasonable creative developer, and that's just a pain in the ass. So we basically say, look, if I could have thought of that without breaking a sweat just by using the standard analysis and coding techniques of the trade, then I'm pretty much going to ignore the "patent" on it, aren't I.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Because most of them would take most competent software engineers about 5 minutes to think up themselves if presented with the problem that the patent claims to be a solution to.
Sometimes, though, figuring out what the problem is, or even that there is a problem in the first place, is decidedly non-trivial.
I'm not nearly as anti-patent as most people around here are, and this patent is borderline at best IMO, but I do think it falls into this category.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think we should be allowing patents based on the novelty of the problem rather than the novelty of the invention to solve it.
Re:Why we think all or almost all s/w patents are (Score:4, Insightful)
How many of you think this will actually be used? It won't be, it however, does prevent me from making a program to solve this "problem".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The examiners seem not to be able to have a proper idea of non-obviousness (to a practitioner in the field), when it comes to software patents.
So, are you a practitioner in the field of patent law with a proper idea of the legal requirements of 35 U.S.C. 103, or are you a practitioner in the field of software programming, with a proper idea of "obvious", as defined by Webster's or the OED?
My guess is it's the latter rather than the former, and you're criticizing the patent examiners of - oh, gosh - following the law.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. It seems that the patents are being granted to people for thinking of problems rather than for thinking of solutions.
Re: (Score:2)
Because many are really defensive patents. They are not original in any way, but to issue a challenge to any one of them would cost several years worth of litigation. These are purely defensive - if someone sues, the company will just counter-sue.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, the person or thing performing the method steps doesn't have to understand the meanings of the colors. The database can present that mapping info to them, and the mapping could have also been provided by a third party (e.g., the recipient or sender of the e-mail).
As for the summary being flamebait, it's regular practice here to complain about a patent without reading the claims first.
Typical IBM strategy (Score:2)
As an ex IBM'er this is pretty typical - IBM blankets technology with patents and many of them are not too terribly good or valid. Others are truly emerging things worthy of patent.
Several of my patents while working for them I said "well this really isn't a new thing" but they had me file anyway. Go figure.
Re:Typical IBM strategy (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Black is the New Red (Score:5, Funny)
I know when I'm emailing my Korean friends, I always switch from the default black to black when I really want get their attention.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So all your friends in Korea are old people?
Too late I patented the use of bouncing light (Score:2)
For the detection of differences in things.
I am pretty sure that trumps their patent.
Royalties!!!
Got Same Status as AIDS/Cancer Cure Patent Apps (Score:2)
BTW, the Petition To Make Special [uspto.gov] that IBM exploited to expedite the color-my-world patent's approval is also used to speed up patent apps for inventions that improve the quality of the environment, contribute to the development or conservation of energy resources, contribute to countering terrorism, or relate to recombinant DNA, superconductivity, HIV/AIDS, or cancer.
Re: (Score:2)
There are other requirements for an accelerated examination petition to be approved. For example, they have to provide their own search report (which is then supplemented by the examiner's search), and they have to point out where there is support under 35 USC 112, first paragraph, in the specification for all elements of the claim. They also have to pay a fee.
The "hot topic" rule for making an application special doesn't require a fee and only requires that the claims are directed to one of those special
Cultural difference in colors. (Score:2)
Differences like "Being Blue" in English means being sad, but "Being Blue" in German means being drunk?
Does that mean the "Big Blue" is now sad AND drunk?
Or does it mean that IBM is now known as the "Big Mauve" in some countries?
No more HTML e-mail? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean we can expect IBM to start suing anyone who uses HTML-formatted e-mail? Because I think that would probably be a good thing.
p
I'm building on this patent (Score:2)
Don't feel so good (Score:3, Funny)
CSS (Score:3, Informative)
IBM re-invented CSS.
This is exactly the thing CSS was created for; visual mark-up based on semantics.
A few tags around the urgent bits and your own little localized CSS should do the trick.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, so you can submarine patent the obvious by DOING IT BADLY.
It all makes sense now...
Re: (Score:2)
Don't worry, making it too easy to color every message in red is just an artifact of the Lotus Notes horrible UI [eproductivity.com]. Thankfully, other email systems don't have that problem, so I don't think anyone is going to want to steal/use (or even see the value in) that sloppy patented workaround.
In any case, kudos to IBM Korea for speaking up on this issue. As an American, I'm just as annoyed by IBM's Lotus Notes user interface. I'm just sad that IBM's management sees this as an isolated cultural issue, and not as a mo
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder why they think it's worth spending money patenting stuff like that. Even if you do get the patent, who is going to bother using that idea? Much less pay for using it.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not how it works. What happens is that lower-level management is told to be on the look-out for any new functionality that programmers and engineers make, no matter how small, and forward it to a group that then scans the changes for patentability.
So a coder decides it would be nifty if the X-Face in e-mail automatically gets displayed in the address book too, and adds five lines of code to do just that. And then a completely different department sees his manager's report, and decides to patent it.
Re: (Score:2)
but patents like that are worthless, so what's the point? why bother patenting something that's clearly is not gonna hold up in any court?
Because every patent they collect can be added to their balance sheet (so they get better credit ratings, potentially higher stock value, etc). Of course, these patents are third-rate derivative assets whose value has little or no basis in reality, and at one point or another the patent bubble will burst. After all, as the financial markets recently discovered: you can't keep selling and trading hot air only based on valuations from accountants' and lawyers' wet dreams.
Re: (Score:2)
Almost all settlements contain a clause of non-disclosure, so how would you know?
Re: (Score:2)
Thats the problem, its in the last 20minutes that somebody would have pointed out, "HEY, you guys realize i was just kidding right", but because of they cut of the last 20min the boss never realizes!