Microsoft's Bold Patent Move 571
theodp writes "On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that Microsoft has a patent pending for displaying numbers in a box to make them stand out. " Check out the images to see the power of this breakthrough patent. That's almost impossible to do without patents.
Context highlighting? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, this is laughable even among laughable patents. But you can't blame Microsoft, as much as you might want to, you need to blame Congress, which allows this complete farce of a department to slowly undermine the entire economy of the U.S.
It's just a matter of time before something like the alleged patent on hyperlinks by BT actually gets issued and some company decides to hold the entire computer industry hostage. Hopefully, the economic damage won't be too great before our chumpresentatives decide to take a few minutes from their lobbyist-financed caviar and Dom Perignon snack-break and return the implementation of patents to something within the same area code of what was originally intended.
The system is screwed, you can't blame MS for using it. If they don't someone else, like SCO, perhaps, will do it.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Take medications, for example. IANAL, but my take on it would be that (for example), if I come up with, say, a new class of painkillers that are different from those we have today, then that's patentable, because it wouldn't be obvious that substances of the new class do function as painkillers, or that if you wanted a painkiller, using that class of substances would be the natural way to go.
On the other hand, if I take an established kind of painkillers and modify it slightly (for example, by replacing a hydrogen atom with a CH3 group somewhere) to get a new substance, then that's not patentable, since I didn't do anything fundamentally new and non-obvious.
The same thing seems to apply here (although it's hard to tell, as the server's currently slashdotted). Even if you take the article summary with a big grain of salt (which is advisable on Slashdot), it's hard to imagine that making numbers stand out in a document is something non-obvious - or, for that matter, something new.
Remember, the purpose of patents is not to give businesses a way of extracting money from everyone; the purpose is to further science and technology by encouraging research. The 20-year monopoly that comes with the grant of a patent is a reward for doing that research, if you will - but that also means that the contribution to science and technology should be big enough to justify this reward.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, you might not. According to the patent, one of the major features of the software is the ability to remove the highlighting. In fact, the highlighting is intended to be temporary, and is not embedded into the document stream. If you wrote software that embedded bold tags into the document itself, you'd be doing something similar yet quite different.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, googles gonna hate me for this, but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, so I'm going to hell. Still, someone had to do it.
Prior art: Symbolics Genera & CLIM (Score:5, Interesting)
Machines)used something called "Dynamic Windows" which was later further developed as CLIM (the "Common Lisp Interface Manager"). Among the various features of that system was the ability to annotate output with its datatype. e.g., and I'll simplify notation here for presentational clarity (and to save me looking it up) but it's substantially like this:
(with-output-as-presentation (stream 'integerThis would cause the user to see the string "a bit more than five" but the system to have backing store information (kind of like the HREF that underlies a URL presentation in a browser, except that's really more imperative in nature rather than declarative) that says that if the user clicks on that, he's really clicking on 5.3 instead.
What was interesting about the way Genera did it was that there was a conceptual relationship between "presentation" (the analog of printing output) and "accepting" (the analog of reading input). If someone later did:
(accept 'integerthen the mouse would become aware of all the occurrences of things that had been presented as integers (or even things that could be coerced to integers). The system could be further abstracted so that if you output British Pounds and someone asked for input of American Dollars, translators ran so that when you clicked on the value in pounds, it got translated at input time to the appropriate representation (presumably the translator you wrote knew how to acceess the currency exchange to do this). Output in inches could be converted to feet or meters, of course, without such network appliances.
But the key feature which seems to have been "obvious" even decades ago when Symbolics did this work was the idea of highlighting data of various kinds with boxes. In that case, it wasn't even limited to numeric data. It could be any kind of data, even things of different types that were hierachically presented (such a filename listing being sensitive on its whole line as a file, but as only part of the line for this and that date mentioned in the listing).
And it didn't get patented then, which to my understanding of patent law means it's missed its chance...
The really sad thing is that so few people know about this I/O paradigm, which had some very cool features. And then such sadness is compounded when others come along and attempt to say they dreamt up the idea.
I mean, geez, people have been drawing boxes around in paper for a long time. I don't doubt there's some implementation of a kids' book that has a piece of cellophane you can pull back and forth to highlight something. I recall things that use red over red text to make the text "become invisible" being implemented in physical books when I was a kid. That's a form of emphasis through boxes, too!
The patent office is way overboard these days. I think software copyright serves a critical purpose, but I think software patents are an abomination. I'd like to see the software patent system overhauled completely [nhplace.com].
Re:Well... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.watacrackaz.com/misc/php/competition.p
here's the source:
http://www.watacrackaz.com/misc/php/competitionso
Prior art?
Re:Well... (Score:2, Interesting)
First, I don't believe Microsoft committed widespread bribery of the federal government to get out of their antitrust conviction. AFAIk, they were actually found guilty in that case. Now their sentencing may have been a little light, but I believe that was more due to the change in administration to a more pro-big business president.
Microsoft did make some very strong proposals for patent reform [microsoft-watch.com] about 6 months ago. They have lost several cases recently over patents, I really don't think they are fans. My theory is they are so fed up with the patent system that they are going to file every patent possible so they either
Microsoft has a lifelong reputation for stealing things, last thing they want are patents on other people's ideas.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess I can, because I built a scanner like that some ten years ago. I don't have the code right here, though, so you'll just have to believe me.
My scanner (which, with a hard word, is called a natural language tokenizer, although the text-to-speech people call it a pre-processor) also scanned for names, abbreviations, mathematical formulas and other things that some linguists would call "noise".
Scanners for names had already been around for awhile, because they were used in stock news abstraction generators. The idea behind my scanner was to build something that would allow corpus linguists to build more complex grammars that were rooted more in reality than what had come before.
Re:Prior art + obviousness (Score:3, Interesting)
In particular, there is the requirement that patents cover "non obvious" innovations, and yet what I saw was patent after patent after patent that covered techniques and ideas that any reasonable practitioner of the art would think to try. I did not see a single instance of an idea that struck me as fundamentally revolutionary. I resented the idea that I would actually have to seek some sort of costly licensing arrangement if I actually wished to produce a gadget that used these ideas, ideas which had been "patented" not because they were stupendously innovative, but simply because they had been identified.
The notion that patent examiners all have a minimum BS in our field makes me chuckle. I don't doubt it, but there is such a thing as Judgement which comes from experience and practice.
It has been said that the young think that they have invented sex. Fortunately none have, so far, been permitted to patent it; although I wouldn't put it past the USPTO.
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The contemporary USPTO is primarily useful for enabling IP lawyers to fart through silk.