Surfcast Sues Microsoft Over Tile Patent

An anonymous reader writes with news of a company suing Microsoft for infringing upon a patent for tiles with live content. From the article: "SurfCast, in a complaint filed yesterday in a U.S. District Court in Maine, said Microsoft infringes one of its four patents — No. 6,724,403 — by 'making, using, selling, and offering to sell devices and software products' covered by SurfCast's patent. That includes mobile devices using the Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 operating systems as well as PCs using Windows 8/RT."

now a tile with no rounded corners!

[mhsobhani]

so both simple rectangle and rounded rectangle are now patented!

Seriously?!

[oPless]

A computerized method of presenting information from a variety of sources on a display device. Specifically the present invention describes a graphical user interface for organizing the simultaneous display of information from a multitude of information sources. In particular, the present invention comprises a graphical user interface which organizes content from a variety of information sources into a grid of tiles, each of which can refresh its content independently of the others. The grid functionality manages the refresh rates of the multiple information sources. The present invention is intended to operate in a platform independent manner.

Seriously?

A) How was this even granted a patent in 2000? It's really obvious, to anyone with a computing degree.

B) How it wasn't picked up on a patent search.

C) Why didn't they sue two years ago when WP7 was released?

Software patents are fundamentally wrong :(

Re:Not a troll

[godrik]

I went through the patent. I will not claim there is anything of value in there. But they actually describe a full architecture of a system with asynchronous event, bandwidth limitations, dynamic refresh rates, multi device displays. They actually did something, they are not trolling. This is one of the most reasonnable patent I read in a long time.

Re:Not a troll

[ilguido]

Dunno, I used dockapps on windowmaker well before they granted the patent to Microsoft.

Re:Not a troll

[Baloroth]

After reading the article, I really think that SurfCast is right in suing Microsoft. It seems to be the same thing and it's a novel way of doing things.

It doesn't even matter how valid the patent is, really (although given it is software and... well, a tile display is not novel no matter how you dress it up), what really makes a troll a troll is that they have no products. Surfcast has none, and from what I understand, never did. Therefore, they are patent trolls.

Re:now a tile with no rounded corners!

[nschubach]

Not so fast! http://www.google.com/patents/EP1921575A1?cl=en [google.com]

Actually, didn't MS try Hexagons for WM6.5?

Re:Not an untroll, either

[ilguido]

Are you kidding, trolling or are you just misinformed? Windowmaker dockapps could retrieve weather infos from remotely accessed sources ten years ago at the least, there were/are dozens of email dockapp, there are dockapps that notify when a website updates and there are even web radio dockapps. Perhaps the 2004 patent granted to surfcast is invalid, for sure the 2011 patent granted to MS is invalid and I hope that this litigation could invalidate it (at least a 2004 patent expires before a 2011 patent).

Re:Not an untroll, either

[SQLGuru]

Windows 95. Active Desktop.

Sure, the implementation was plagued with bugs, but it would update square widgets with data from remote sources. It was in Win95.