Microsoft Patents 'Phone-Home' Failure Reporting 361
theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO awarded a patent to Microsoft for its Method and system for reporting a program failure, although a much more sophisticated version of this technology has been standard on IBM mainframes for years. Maybe prior art searches will improve once the USPTO moves into the new two million square foot USPTO campus, which includes five interconnected buildings, a twelve-story atrium, a landscaped two-acre park, and a museum."
Here we go again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you just love how vague this is? It could cover almost anything, including embedded things like elevators, automated ovens and whatnot...
OK, I didn't read the whole thing, but the abstract just goes to show how little is needed these days to patent software. Argh.
There is NO prior art (Score:5, Insightful)
This feature is clearly specified in the patent, which the moderator obviously didn't read before making his comment about IBM's prior art.
So this patent is perfectly valid, as no other bug reporting system known currently has this capability.
Possible positive side effect (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, I don't know about you, but I find that a pretty bad way to go about improving your software. "Yeah it's buggy now, but allow us to analyse the gazillion crashes and we'll be able to reduce them to just a few hundred thousand."
Microsoft patents this, and thereby makes sure that no-one else gets to use this way of working (because we all know how happy Microsoft is about granting licenses to competitors). That's a GOOD THING. Competitors will be forced to use methods like improving the quality of the software through design, not PRODUCING buggy software in the first place, instead of pissing your users off by not only crashing software, but sending a bunch of data across your network, potentially complaining about not having an active connection, and opening up all kinds of exploits by triggering faults deliberately etc. etc.
Re:I think I get it now... (Score:2, Insightful)
Then perhaps a business model where they get $5 for approving a patent but $500,000 for finding prior art themselves would get them and the development community working together again, with some level of trust?
Re:I think I get it now... (Score:1, Insightful)
It's time to get rid of software patents. Why isn't there a US section of FFII [ffii.org]? In Europe they defeated the patent lawyer lobby groups and reached an amendment to the software patent directive which will reduce patentability to "computer-implemented inventions" only. Hope this will pass the EU minister (judicial!! argh!) council.
We need an international movement against those trivial patents that benefit the lawyer community and patent grabbers (EOLAS
Re:Here we go again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, I don't know. Perhaps you RFTP and not rely on the abstract? If two seem similar you need to do further investigation of the patents themselves, not just stop at the abstract and say "loo, the abstract for patent A says it affects wigets in this manner and the abstract for patent B affects wigets in the same or very similar manner." The patent itself will explain what the difference is and why it's different than what everyone else is doing.
Re:Contestation period (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:There is NO prior art (Score:1, Insightful)
a) Lack of prior art does not validate a patent. It also has to BE art, i.e., original and non-obvious. I think we have a serious breakdown at that point with the patent.
b) You have no way of knowing that there isn't prior art. Even if IBM doesn't have it, thousands of other developers could be doing this.
c) If no one is doing it yet, that doesn't have to be because nobody thought of it. It would likely be because such a detailed level of error reporting is unnecessary in the vast majority of situations, and so has made little business sense in the past. Do you mean to suggest that I should patent every business or software direction that *may* be worthwhile in the future, because no matter how obvious it is, all that matters is who does it first? Why not patent a method of logging all system actions remotely? If I patent it today and it's not useful or common for 5 years does that mean it was original and non-obvious? Give me a break, I could write a computer script that came up with ideas like this.
d) The 'differences' MS uses to deny prior art are laughably trivial, such as how most systems are built to only report fatal errors. So what, every current limitation of a program should allow competitive lock-in? If I write an email app that shows 20 emails per page with no setting in its first iteration, my competition should be able to patent 'Method for Arbitrary Pagination in an Electronic Communications Client'?
By definition (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no such thing as a valid software patent.
What most of you snot-nosed kids don't realize is that before the 90's, there was *no such thing* as software patents.
And despite this, lets look at what was invented:
Mainframes
PC's
The Internet (yes!)
Client/Server
Web Browsers
Routers
programming languages
Holy cow, why would people invent all this software if there was no patent?
Since we've had software patents, we've invented...uh.... Well, One click shopping and Microsoft Phone home.
I'll let the reader decide which is a better environment for innovation .
Re:I think I get it now... (Score:3, Insightful)
For God's sake, any patent can be summarized into a phrase making it sound obvious, and most patents are actually about some marginally improved twist on a mature technology. That's why they have things like cites of previous patents.
On Slashdot, any new patent gets described in a way that makes a caveman beating two rocks together sound like prior art. I recall some clever LCD resolution enhancement get compared to Wozniak's also clever but completely unrelated scheme for kludging NTSC color out of a TTL circuit.
We need a new moderation "-100 Just doesn't understand."
Re:There is NO prior art (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:the US PTO is a profit-center, not a regulator (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems pretty obvious to me. Government profits off everything it does, because government cannot "fail" as private business can. When your revenue is acquired through force, rather than voluntary trade, the concepts of risk and loss are eliminated. Even when a government program fails miserably, government still profits. I'll cite the "war on drugs" as an obvious example.
Re:Netscape Talk Back? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ideas are not patentable!!! Only implementations are patentable! Hence, Microsoft making a specific non-obvious implementation of an already known idea does actually qualify as patentable.
That said, now supposing that the patent is too broad and the clauses encompass prior art then there is a case of stricking out the clauses in question and perhaps invalidating the whole patent.
Re:talkback (Score:3, Insightful)
So, what's a "non-fatal program failure"? Does that mean it's just wounded, but will get better? Does that mean the program is going to phone home every time the user tries to open the wrong kind of file or the app runs out of memory or the user makes an error? I hope Microsoft is planning on increasing their bandwidth...
Re:Netscape Talk Back? (Score:1, Insightful)
But Talkback is also in Mozilla, and Mozilla is open-source, so that statement is disingenuous.
I'm not familiar with non-fatal crashes in Mozilla. Has anyone seen this?