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Microsoft Patents Interactive Entertainment 466
An anonymous reader writes "Embedded-Watch is carrying a story regarding the award of patent number 6,571,390 to Microsoft. The patent would seem to cover pretty much any implementation of a video-on-demand system that you (or at least I) can think of. Read for yourself to decide whether this patent either is not original work or is blatantly obvious to the most casual observer. The patent could certainly be invalidated by the courts on either point, but that'd take a fight in court that won't be cheap."
big surprise... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:big surprise... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:big surprise... (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that trademark, they have to protect it; similar sounding names trying to cash in on that name have to be pursued, just as Pepsi would undoubtably chase a company makeing "Bepsi cola" or whatever.
The Lindows defence is trying to use the leverage that "Windows" should never have been trademarked, which I don't believe it should have, since WIMP was a term dating back to, IIRC, the late 80's (or possibly earlier) and the trademark wasn't approved until the 90's.
WIMP (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WIMP (Score:5, Funny)
Re:big surprise... (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder if a Cola-flavored brown liquid named "Poopsie" would sell...
Re:registrering common words (Score:5, Insightful)
Acronym: WINDOWS (Score:4, Funny)
When
I
Need
Downtime,
Operate
Windows
Server
It's been done before... (Score:4, Informative)
"Prior Art".
I had "Video on Demand" working on my C64 sometime circa 1983 in conjunction with a couple of VCRs.
Re:It's been done before... (Score:2)
"Fat Chance"
Re:It's been done before... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Bloodsucking Lawyers"
Now that MS has the patent, the burden is on others to take on the legal fight to overturn it. Screw systems work, the real gravy has got to be in IP law...
Re:It's been done before... (Score:3, Funny)
Are lawsuites collections of lawsuits that are filed together and interact? America, I think we have a new word!
Re:It's been done before... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thinking logically... (Score:3, Funny)
That sounds really bleak. Where did you sleep?
WRONG (Score:5, Informative)
Read claim 1, the patentable feature is dealing with scroll rates and adding/removingfor a number of listings in a VOD environment. This is not a patent for VOD itself there are several hundred existing patents for that.
VOD by the way is streaming to a user on demmand imediatly after a program is selected, this is not a patent for just that function rather it builds on it to deal with entries/scrolling.
Re:WRONG (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WRONG (Score:5, Funny)
I'm guessing you're new around here. Slashbots don't bother to read articles; they just see the words "Microsoft" and "patent" on the same page and start frothing at the keyboard.
I've said it a hundred times on here, you can't patent an idea, only the specific implementation of an idea. Patents are all about what seem like minor details, but are actually things that are important, and they've all got very vague, general names. S'why you have to read 'em before commenting.
I agree, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, this discussion board is specifically for people who have never read a patent filing. ;)
I've said it a hundred times on here, you can't patent an idea, only the specific implementation of an idea.
You're right, in that that's the general idea of the patent system - but specific incidents have proven this to be no longer necessarily the case. The most oft-cited and egregious example is the one-click patent. If ever there was a patent on an idea, it's that one. If I were Ford, I'd go patent an engine with more than 40 MPG, because it's the same thing: efficiency of use. And that isn't an implementation.
Re:It's been done before... (Score:5, Interesting)
Do a search on google for "microsoft tiger video on demand server" and you'll see they had this out in 1995, years before they filed the patent. Sorry, it's in the public domain, microsnot.
Re:It's been done before... (Score:2)
And Microsoft's VOD experiments postdated the fully operational SGI Time-Warner Orlando VOD system, as well as losing in a VOD "bake-off" to an SGI VOD-over-fiber system in an NTT trial near Tokyo Disneyworld.
Re:It's been done before... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the patent in question is a continuation of patent 5,861,906 [uspto.gov], which was filed May 5, 1995.
Re:It's been done before... (Score:3, Informative)
Fails on that test, so section (b), with its' one-year grace period after the development of the invention doesn't apply :-)
Re:Wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
I can then go into detail as to how it would work from the users' perspective, again without being able to spell it out in sufficient detail for a patent application.
The situation is analogous to people coming up to you and saying they have a great idea for a game/application/website/whatever, and that, if you develop it for them for free, they'll give you a (small) cut. Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you've been in the coding biz for any le
Re:It's been done before... (Score:2, Informative)
Hotel chains have doing this with in-room movies for years. I can't say for certain how long, but well before Microsoft's 1998 filing of the patent application. I feel almost certain that I was probably browsing a porn movie program guide while travelling a lot and living out of hotel rooms in 1997.
Re:It's been done before... (Score:5, Informative)
The patent is for the storage of your preferences and selections from a database of available digital and/or broadband content, which you may or may not decide to order at some point. If/when you do order the content is delivered on-demand. The point being that subsequent "visits" do not require you to start from scratch indicating what types of content you want to browse/select from, and previously marked items of interest are immediately available to order without the user having to "search" for them again.
It doesn't matter (Score:3)
We get a Microsoft article at least once a day now, often more. Remember when it was more like once a week and even less?
What this patent is. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What this patent is. (Score:5, Informative)
Its more than one would think (Score:5, Insightful)
This patent covers what they're doing too. I've seen at least two hardware/software suites designed to create similar functionality on a smaller scale.
If Microsoft gets aggressive, I wonder who they'll go after first .
As to the patent, I'd say I'm surprised . . . but I'm not surprised.
ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
And they where both doing it looong befor MS started trying.. the software patents are becoming more and more ridiculous.. cant somebody with som time and money to spend just sue MS for 'deliberately sabotaging market' or something ?
Quick! (Score:5, Funny)
Adult Content Industry? (Score:4, Insightful)
On a related note, I wonder what Bill's name would be if he appeared in one of Flynt's works?
Re:Adult Content Industry? (Score:5, Funny)
Billy Longhorn.
Re:Adult Content Industry? (Score:2)
Sadam E. ?
Happy Goodhead?
Re:Adult Content Industry? (Score:5, Funny)
Max
Hmm.. (Score:2, Funny)
Who will patent "Superfluous Patents" first and start hurling lawsuits; SCO or MS?
Re:Hmm.. (Score:2)
XBox Live-networked game monopoly (Score:2, Interesting)
Legally, this will allow MS to shut down EA from providing a portal to all their sports games on PS/2, and Sony and Nintendo will not be allowed to provide a one-stop front end for their modem services either.
Tivo may already have prior art here (Starz on demand) as well as Compuserves networked games and AOL. (Depends on what a "set top box" is).
Read. The. Claims. (Score:5, Informative)
That's it.
It's got absolutely NOTHING to do with XBox Live, EA's PS2 or Nintendo's games, or anything of the sort.
I fully expect that MS will be sued (Score:5, Funny)
ATI TV Cards (Score:2)
Damn, VOD users will have to pay higher fees! (Score:5, Funny)
Err... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, if you're wondering where the middle of nowhere is... Warsaw, NY, pop ~4000. It's between Buffalo and Rochester, it's about an hour from any city with >20000 people. The middle of nowhere.
Re:Err... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why hasn't the EFF stepped up to the plate here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple really, think of a way that MS or another company can screw you. Than all you need to do is get this patented. Once patented the EFF should have a fund to reimburse people for the cost of the patent. At which point the patent should be placed into an EFF trust dedicated to making sure that particular bad idea can't be used. Come on people, let's use their system against them instead of getting it used against us again. For not that much money we could head off a lot of DRM and other such madness before it does it's damage.
Re:Why hasn't the EFF stepped up to the plate here (Score:3, Insightful)
AOL will.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure AOL will happily buy Tivo and sue MS for any sort of award a la the Netscape vs. IE award.
I first read, before a double take.... (Score:2)
Re:so then (Score:2)
And I generally miss entire words in sentences, or misconstrue a word to fit in with what my brain expects to be next. I blame it on staring at a monitor all day, but who knows.
any lawyers here? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:any lawyers here? (Score:4, Interesting)
That is precisely the problem with the US legal system. It is a distinction which the Dutch language captures rather effectively with "gelijk hebben" and "gelijk krijgen". The first means to be right. The second means others acknowledging that you are right, deservedly or not. (lit. "to obtain/be given right") "Gelijk krijgen" in a US court is the hard part...
You can have the full strength of the law on your side, but without legal clout and stamina (i.e. a well-filled war chest) you will end up face down in the dirt against a powerful opponent. If some company takes on Microsoft, MS will simply draw the battle out with every legal trick in the books that their team of lawyers can dig up, until the plaintiff runs out of money. Then they'll make you settle or they just buy your company outright to make the lawsuit go away. A settlement is a double win for Microsoft: one less opponent in this matter, and their patent stands as strongly as it did before.
Amazon.com (Score:2)
This is a fraud (Score:2, Funny)
I would believe it's a Microsoft interface if figure 4 consisted of the single button labeled '76' that took up the whole screen.
File for an invalid patent and pay? (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article... (Score:3, Funny)
Then the inspectors were given bananas and spent the rest of the night swinging in trees by their prehensile tails.
Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a problem (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't. It doesn't even come close to trying to cover those things. It covers a very particular kind of media listing that is scrollable and where the scroll rate is user defined in a preference and where that media view is part of the UI of a VOD system.
Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon's One-Click patent was never invalidated. Faced with a certain defeat in court, Amazon licensed the patent to Barnes and Noble, and as a result if YOU want to compete with Amazon YOU will have to shell out for a legal team to prove the patent is bullshit.
Sounds like a plan... (Score:2)
Step 2: Push the Windows Media edition and provide tv schedule info free over the internet
Step 3: Drive Tivo out of business
Step 4: Profit!
This may be a stupid question (Score:2)
I may just be naive, and they accept every patent application until proven wrong, but I honestly beileved this was the case.
More of a stupid statement. (Score:2)
The whole concept of all of this seems moronic to me. I will go download some Metallica MP3s in spite.
Re:This may be a stupid question (Score:2)
WTH? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's pretty well established that you can't patent something that you didn't invent, and you certainly can't patent something that
And in related news . . . (Score:5, Funny)
As usual, jump the bandwagon (Score:2, Insightful)
"Upon expiration of the rental period, however, the program is no longer readily accessible until ordered again."
This is pay-per-view for Windows Media Player and cie. This is "blatantly obvious" because it talks about customizable SCROLL BARS. Quit bashing the patent case, it's not for what you think. It doesn't englobe EVERYTHING. You'll still be able to enjoy pay per view porn. As long as it doesn't have any scroll bars and any order, LOL have you read that?
Dish On Demand (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if there is partial prior art in my satellite provider's pay-per-view system? You select programs from a scrollable list. Speed of scrolling is variable based on how fast you hit the buttons on the remote (and how fresh the remote batteries are). Previews are peppered all over every channel during commercial breaks. You never wait more than 30 minutes for the start of a show. A feature called "themes" groups content.
It might not wash, but it might be worth a shot.
I *wrote* prior art! (Score:2)
Ugh...More SPS (Shitty Patent Syndrome) (Score:2)
I seem to recall an online "public domain" film site in 1997 as well.
How MS got the patent worries me. They had NOTHING to do with the world of
Did anybody RTFA?! (Score:5, Informative)
Plenty of Prior Art for this too. (Score:3, Informative)
There is even plenty of prior art even for a limited interpretation of the two main patent claims. We KIT [kitv.co.uk] have been doing this for about 5 years and we where not the first.
In one application we have aggregated news clips, they are displayed down the screen in a list and are played from the top at normal speed. When pressing fast-forward >| jumps to the start of the next clip, each pressing of >> accelerates the stream by a factor of two (2x/4x/8x/16x/32x) for each press. Another version allowe
yah sure (Score:2, Funny)
come on
intereactive entertainment is older than spin the bottle
This is a Very limited patent (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anyone read the patent yet? (Score:5, Informative)
Here are the claims to the patent:
Easy to implement around. (Score:5, Interesting)
Somebody should patent exactly this, but add a claim for a "page down" feature. Microsoft will be forced to cross license that patent in order to implement this one in a user-pleasing fashion.
Re:Easy to implement around. (Score:2)
Prior "Art" (Score:5, Funny)
What good is the patent office? (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems like there's been a whole slew of stupid patents running across Slashdot's front page the past while, and it just boggles my mind each time I see a new one, how open-ended all of these are.
Is the purp
A brief primer on patent law (Score:2, Informative)
Submitted story is incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
This patent does not cover video on demand systems. Read the claims of the patent, which describe the novel features covered. These boil down to:
A user interface widget that allows you to see a list of available items, where the UI widget is scrollable and the user can control the scroll rate via a preference and the widget shows videos available on a back-end VOD system.
This is so far from a "patent [that] would seem to cover pretty much any implementation of a video-on-demand system" that its laughable. It covers a very specific feature that is used in a proscribed and specific way. Most VOD system's probably don't have this UI and even if they did it would be easy to work around it.
The short story: don't over-react, this is not a patent on VODs.
Look at the claims before posting (Score:2)
Before you post, make sure to read the actual claims at the USPTO site.
They haven't patented video on demand at all, in spite of all the description in the patent.
They've patented scrolling
What gives them the idea that these claims will hold up for even a minute is anybody's guess.
But besides that, the claims are quite narrow. An implementation that scrolled smoothly or 2 items at a time would completely avoid this pat
Prior Art: Time Warner, 1994, Orlando (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty certain that any NDA i signed expired, and much of this is publically known anyway...
I worked at Time Inc. New Media in 1995. At the time, Time Warner had a fully functional video on demand system rolled out to a few neighborhoods in Orlando, Fl. It was both a source of pride and joy, but also seen as largely unworkable given the economics of the day.
It had features that included random access video, over fiber, distributed from a head-end, an electronic program guide, I believe, that showed either image or video previews, a remote control, pausing, ff/rw, the whole shebang.
The thing was run by an army of centrally located SGI Onyx servers, and the set top box was an SGI workstation, with a lot of stuff stripped out. It even included video games on demand, downloaded to an included Atari Jaguar. It had its own remote control design optimized for VOD. I think that they recycled the design for TW's current on-demand service; I'm guessing that a lot of Orlando tech and know-how is in there, too.
It should be mentioned that it featured an interface that was totally based on 3D imagery, and would appear advanced today. 8 years ago, it was just science fiction come to life.
This was not just pie-in-sky - it was completely functional. It just wasn't economically scaleable given the computational and compression limitations of the tme. Which is why I think that they mothballed it - to wait for cheaper servers, cheaper storage, cheaper bandwidth, better compression. And $200 set top boxes to display the video and interface.
Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Time-Warner, but they did, at least in the 90's, do some innovation.
Now, INAPE (not a patent examiner), but I'd say that Orlando pretty much invalidates this patent, from the EPG to the actual video-on-demand aspects. More importantly, the prior art has a muscle bound organization behind it to hopefully invalidate this straight away.
Jonathan
OK, this is getting rediculous... (Score:5, Insightful)
Editors: Stop posting stories with misleading summaries! It confuses the Slashdot community, who likes to post their knee-jerk reactions.
I'm gonna lose my karma for this, so be it. Slashdot sucks more and more every day, with duplicates, misleading summaries, and Ask Slashdots that could be solved by Googling, eopinions.com (Color laser printer), or reading your manual ("broken" V-chip is actually CC text mode). Check out "Not Slashdot", kuro5hin.org [kuro5hin.org]
restraint of trade/ideas (Score:5, Informative)
This patent is just another example of why WE NEED TO ORGANISE an OPEN SOURCE PATENT ASSOCIATION and each of us needs to throw in $100 bux or $1000 or whatever it takes to finance an organisation that can both patent and fight for us. As a member of an organzation like this we would have the right to use any patents that we hold and we _CAN_ prevent M$ and TI and IBM and everyone else from using these patents. If _our_ organisation simply picks the best ideas we come up with and patents them in very short order we'll have a rather mean shief of patents up our collective sleeves.
USP doesn't care about prior art (Score:4, Funny)
After all, someones once patented a XOR cursor routine (patent #4,197,590)
You may be amused, or horrified, by some of these software patent examples [base.com]. It appears that Europe is not really that much better, something the Patent Horror Gallery [ffii.org] explicates.
So Be Aware: If my karma drops below good, I may issue a patent for a system that karmafies people and then sue the hell out of OSDN ;-)
Link to prior art. (Score:3, Informative)
Prior Art [ieee.org]
Not much Different from Motel Systems (Score:3, Interesting)
Didn't Apple have scroll bars before MS reverse engineered the windows interface? Have they waited too long to patent them? Has anyone yet decided to patent those scroll arrows at the end of the scroll bars?
Perhaps the use of scroll and VOD and a couple of other things make the application unique, but I don't see anything that seems to be "not obvious".
The patent office is NOT about patents. OT&ID (Score:3, Insightful)
Bitch-slappin', 12 sandwich-eatin', high-priced laywers paid for by larger and larger companies make deals to keep the kids out of the sandbox.
Why would you change if you were the patent office? You get your money, the companies battle it out, the lawyers are red-eyed with hookers and blow - everybody wins!
Oh, except for that pesky citezenry.
The Real Question (Score:3, Insightful)
If this patent was rejected, would it have stopped MS from developing and rolling this out and collecting profits from it? Would it have given competition unfair market share away from MS? Does the award of the patent justify return on investment for developing this new invention?
Who the FUCK are these people in the patent office? I'm a noob when it comes to law and patents, and I don't know much about VOD, but even I can tell you to chuck this out. Can someone with some clout or maybe who has a friend in the news industry or technews (online or paper) please convince a reporter to go visit the patent office and find out what they are doing? It doesn't appear to be that the people with decision making roles in vital positions, whether they are in the seat of power or not (it may just be a paper-pushin dweeb like me) has any moral, ethical or mental capacity to defer judgement of this sort of thing. Either that or he knows nothing about technology (and he works in the patent office?). I'd like his name, face, address and phone number plastered all over slashdot so we can harass him from time to time. People must be accountable for their actions or we continue this path. It doesn't take alot of imagination or visionary forsight to see where it leads.
"What are you doing."
"I'm processing a patent for..."
"What are you doing."
"Well I was telli..."
"What are you doing."
"Wa... I..."
"What are you doing."
"I'm just..."
Smack!
"Ow... that hur..."
Please see previous article: Auction Patent [slashdot.org]
Whew! (Score:5, Funny)
*me sweats bullets*
Summary:The patent would seem to cover pretty much any implementation of a video-on-demand system that you (or at least I) can think of.
* me breathes sigh of relief *
For a moment, I though M$ finally had the means to patent the sexual act.
I don't think so. (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, correct me if you've delved deeper into the details than I.
After reading the Claims and Summary of the Invention sections, it appears that the inventions Microsoft is claiming are:
That is all.
It may seem that Microsoft is claiming world+dog in the VOD realm, but that's only because they have to describe the entire system to provide the appropriate context for their claimed inventions. This is the mistake Mr. Wolfe makes in the linked article on Embedded Watch. He seems to think everything in the detailed description is part of the claim.
Patent Number 6,570,390? (Score:4, Insightful)
And I though the tech economy had collapsed? Perhaps now that they can't make money on real products, they have to make money on royalties.
MS: Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don't... (Score:3, Insightful)
...patent, that is. If MS didn't patent this, AOL/TW or some other company might have. If MS patents it, everybody accuses them of being part of the patent problem.
The companies aren't the problem. The system is the problem. The patent system is set up to encourage an escalation of silly patents. Patents are the weapons, the patent office is the arms merchant, and small companies are buffer states between superpowers. Until that changes, MS, SBC, AOL/TW, IBM, and every other corporation on the planet will be filing silly patents to get ahead of their enemies who might file the same silly patent.
There are plenty of reasons to point fingers at MS, this isn't one of them.
Re:MS: Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don't... (Score:3, Insightful)
Using "prior art" to overturn a patent isn't as easy as you think. If you go to court, and the other guy has a patent and you don't, then you have to prove that his patent is invalid. All the patent holder has to do is wave a piece of paper in front of the judge. By default, the patent holder has the patent. The "prior art" claimant has to change the status of the situation.
In other words, you are blaming MS for not putting the burden of proof on itself.
Re:I'll probably be trolled down for that, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'll probably be trolled down for that, but ... (Score:2)
The difference is that no one is going to sue Open Source projects and one of their main arguments is "Hey, you can't sue us because we're innovative!" ...
Re:I'll probably be trolled down for that, but ... (Score:2)
I think you're forgetting Unix - it was open source, before someone decided that to make a buck off it they needed to close the source.
I'd also add that most "open source" projects are started by some one who needs a program to do something, so they are often in fairly established areas, but this doesn't mean that they are not good/useful projects.
Sendmail would also strike me as an exception to you rule.
Re:This sucks...like a frat boy at a sweet sixteen (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing is, if microsoft suddenly finds its share price dropping or people quit the windows habit cold-turkey, we're all in for something that looks kinda like the end of Akira.
Just my $0.02
Re:Bah, only yourselves to blame (Score:2)
It was filed in 1998. It was probably never published. Only patents filed on or after November 29, 2000 get published before being patented, unless specifically requested by the assignee.
Re:Blatantly obvious? Grammar nitpick (Score:5, Funny)
plenty on VOD not on scrolling (Score:3, Informative)
the patent is for setting a scroll rate within a vod listings application, read claim 1.
yes you found prior art on VOD, but to invalidate the patent you need art on a VOD application that lets a user set how fast listings will scroll via a personal preference option.