Microsoft Patents The Task List

theodp writes "'Better not get too fancy with your grocery list, now that Microsoft has patented a glorified form of the to-do list.' Issued Tuesday, the patent covers the use of a 'task list' generated from 'TODO' comments in source code."

Easy...

3. Sue itself!

Re:Easy...

No, not quite.....

3. Sue everyone else.

This is what they're up to. I've been pondering what it was that they've been doing over the past year or so with all these settlements of lawsuits, and now we see all these patents being granted -- they're going to bombard the USPTO in patent applications hoping that given the sad state of affairs there that a fair amount like this will be granted, regardless of any prior art.

Then, once a critical mass of patents have been built, they'll bury the US legal system and competitors in so much paperwork for patent infringement that neither the courts nor the defendant parties will be able to react. With patents in hand (legit or not), there's little that the courts can do to them for bringing frivolous lawsuits, and the people being sued won't be able to keep up with the sheer amount of litigation in either time or cost.

Then, once a sufficient amount of patent lawsuit success is obtained and precedents are set, they launch the blitzkrieg against IBM. What better way to fight a patent war than to have your own arsenal of battle-tested patents.

And while all this is going on, they'll be able to do just about whatever the heck they want, a la the bully days of the 90's. Gobble up companies, steal ideas, squelch OSS innovation due to FUD over whether or not a given product is free of proprietary code....it all makes sense....

Damn....it's just one of those things that is so obvious and so simple, yet so well hidden. It may be worth doing a lookup of pending patents with the USPTO to see what's coming up -- I'm guessing the backlog from Redmond is substantial.

Re:Easy...

Dude, no one competes with IBM on patents, they have averaged more than a patent a day for as long as any currently enforceable patent has been in existance. That is one game even Gates won't try. It would be like trying to win a land war in China, you might suceed for a while but eventually the sheer mass of your opponent will wear you down.

Re:Easy...

A patent a day?

At that rate surely IBM (and/or others) have patents for just about everything MS are trying to patent... or for most components of the patents.....

Is "somebody else patented that before you did" a valid argument in patent law?

IBM won't enter into it unless MS are stupid enough to take them on directly, but the little people MS are using as a leg-up for their argument might just be able to say "your patent is just the combination of all these patents, all owned by other people" - which might remove any argument they can throw at you. (obligatory: IANAL)

All that remains is finding time to find all the necessary patents. Perhaps this is a good open project: looking up the patents that cover stuff MS has patents for/is patenting. Make the info available on a web site so anyone under threat has a ready-reference of defenses, and cases they hae been successfully used in. People will still get dragged into court, but it will only take them an hour to do the research, rather than possible years.

Who knows, maybe one day there will be a ruling of "invalid as listed on the Many Silly PATENTS web site - mspatents.net"

Re:Easy...

I forsee http://patents.groklaw.net/ coming soon to a web browser near you....

Re:Easy...

Dude, no one competes with IBM on patents, they have averaged more than a patent a day for as long as any currently enforceable patent has been in existance.

I think your numbers are just a *tad* off. Yes, they do a bit more than a patent per day. In fact, according to IBM [ibm.com], they get over 6,000 patents per year. That's over 16 every day of the year, or about 24 per business day.

Re:Easy...

Actually that number includes all of their partners in that area.

In 2003, IBM received 3,415 U.S. patents from the USPTO. This is the eleventh consecutive year that IBM has received more U.S. patents than any other company in the world.
linky [ibm.com].

So not quite 6K, but more than I thought (almost 10 a day!) Their 10 year average is closer to 7 a day, and if you go back 26 years I'm sure it's even lower. Of course the rediculous number makes my point even more clear that fighting IBM in a patent battle is sheer stupidity.

Re:Easy...

Blockquoth the poster:

It would be like trying to win a land war in China, you might suceed for a while but eventually the sheer mass of your opponent will wear you down.

Next, I hear, Microsoft plans to go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line...

Re:Easy...

Don't forget "invade Russia in the winter." That's always a classic.

Re:Easy...

What's even scarier. Not only does IBM have a massive patent portfolio... But, since the antitrust trial in the early '80s, they never, ever abuse them. They know just how much damage attracting the government's attention and earning the ill will of the techies can cause. So instead, they take the simplest, most direct road to success. They play fair.

Re:Easy...

Lets be fair. We all know microsoft loses a lot of money from copying other people's IP. MS is creating a huge portfolio of things everyone who writes software will be in violation of one of them. MS is creating these patents not to attack innocent people, but to defend it's illegal activities.

Re:Easy...

7. Kill yourself because your GIRLFRIEND is a fat virgin Slashdot troll who lives in YOUR basement =>

Hehehe. Sorry. Couldn't resist. But it'll be worth it even for the negative mods.

Re:Perfect Setup

This is another news post that throws crap into the face of the public. I could write the whole day comments like this [slashdot.org] and never be off-topic.

Remember our tea-throwing ancenstors. Corporations, governments cannot, must not control the people. This is another disgusting move to get to own each and every aspect of the peoples lives.

Remember the phrase "divide et impera" - it's used again one fringe minority each time. "No one cares about Microsoft but the zealots", "No one cares about civil liberties but the conspiracy nutcases", "No one cares about media consolidation but the art freaks", "No one cares about the environment but the rabid tree huggers", "No one can think $something but $fringe/criminal/outcastgroup_X"

Stop being indifferent about it. "First they came for the jews, then for them and for them and last for me", you remember that poem.

Ever asked why no one in Germany resisted Hitler? They always thought "it's not gonna be THAT worse, calm down!". They didn't believe the thing about Auschwitz even if they saw it afterwards.

Re:Perfect Setup

No, they were all conditioned and believed firmly they are being attacked and threatened by the Jewish minority. No kidding, they would have sworn it was them who began the aggression and could have counted a looong list what they had done to them. That it all was faked and made up by the regime to incite hate and to create a scapegoat would not have sprung to their minds. And yes, they believed their newspapers were still independent. They believed anti-semitism and the assault on neighboring Poland was a kind of revenge on those who attacked them.

And so many people believe it is the Arabs who started a kind of war with the US and that a war on terror or torturing them in concentration camps is fair "revenge" for something "the Arabs" (all 800 million of them?) had supposedly done.

Add to that the incarceration without lawyer or notice, torture, prison camps outside the borders (like many German camps back then, most of them were in former Poland!) media and population control, a "war on everything" and you're pretty close on what kind of state 1936's Germany was in.

Be Fair

Hey, be fair to Microsoft!

I'm all for the usual baiting of Micro$oft as the evil monopoly that they are but this one's legitimate.

I think anyone who ever installed a copy of Windows ME will agree that Microsoft need all the help they can when it comes to itemising the TODO list in their source code.

Re:Be Fair

But what they need to do is spend less time patenting the TODO list and spend more time shortening it.

Re:Be Fair

How can this one be legit? I've been doing this for years! /* TODO: add extra format checking */

hostname$ grep TODO *

Re:Can I play too? Microsoft's To-Do List

or the buffer overflow

Re:Avoiding the TODO

s/TODO/FIXME/g

This sed script to avoid this patent is released under the GPL.

Re:Perfect Setup

In defense of the beast, they've been getting hit with bad patent law suits worse than anyone.

To name a few from the last couple years:

There was the incredibly broad Eolas patent.
There was the burst patent.
There was the down right stupid DRM patent.
There were a couple hand held device patents.
There was the supposed "relational database" patent, which really offended me.

And others.

If I were getting sued anywhere near as much as they are, you better believe I would patent every stupid feature I came up with.

Yet, in most of these stupid patent cases that actually make it to court, they lose. And they keep losing.

Not that they can't afford it.
It's the principle, I guess.

Of course...

I haven't read the patent (it is Slashdot after all), but the Eclipse development environment does this.

Re:Of course...

I use both. The eclipse development environment got this feature WELL after the dot net betas had it. However, I think they both cloned it from NetBeans...

Re:Of course...

Delphi 5 had that feature in it. I know 4 was 1998, not sure of 5's release date, and I'm too lazy to look it up.

Actually it's much older than that

I've seen programmers littering the code with initialed comments like "FIX ME [NAME]" and running the highly complex "grep" and "find" utilities under *nix and Windows for a couple decades.

The fact that someone formatted it in a pretty dialog box is about as innovative as changing the color of your shoelaces.

The fact that anyone would apply for such a patent just demonstrates how sad and pathetic the American legal system has become as it self-destructs on a diet of lawyers and political kickbacks feeding on the very businesses that used to drive the economy. It's a shame, really. Probably no more than 10-15 years before the nation starts looking to India or Poland for handouts.

OTOH, maybe we should worry. Broke bullies with guns tend to become muggers, not beggars.

Re:Of course...

This patent specifically applies to automatically generated lists in an IDE.

I wouldn't worry about your grocery list...

...unless you generate it from comments in your source code. ;)

Re:I wouldn't worry about your grocery list...

It's not as broad as it might have been, but arguments about software patents in general put aside for now, the fact that you can patent something that you do (linking a list with source code comments) rather than the way that you do it (using XYZ type of code to create ABC functionality) shows that the patent system is broken.

Take, for example, the Dyson cleaner - it was a completely new way of making a vaccum cleaner and they patented their way of doing it. Other companies also did cyclone vaccums in their own ways. If Dyson had been able to patent the idea (cyclone based cleaners) rather than their implementation it would've locked out the competition completely. Why can't the patent office see this? It's what they're paid to do, after all.

Patent abuse... is a lot of hot air.

If Dyson owned that patent, and a tornado destroyed the Dyson factory, would Dyson be able to sue for patent abuse?

Because it's not what they're actually paid to do

What they actually get their money for is issuing patents.

And they are proud of the fact that they're one of the few parts of government that is a revenue center.

And other parts of government are hungry for their revenue.

This is one of those cases where following the bottom line is going to get you the wrong result.

Re:I wouldn't worry about your grocery list...

I wouldn't worry about your grocery list unless you generate it from comments in your source code. ;)

It's so convenient to make notes in source code. Isn't that what our computers are for, to manage our data? Compare this

need more jolt (emu.cpp line 2)
pay electric bill (emu.cpp line 11)
out of potato chips (emu.cpp line 24)

with the verbose

// start emulating a track
// TODO: need more jolt
assert( rom );

// clear all memory
cpu.low_mem.assign( 0 );
sram.assign( 0 );
eram.assign( 0 );
unmapped_page.assign( 0 );

// TODO: pay electric bill

// set memory mapping

// start out unmapped
int i;
for ( i = 0; i < page_count; ++i ) {
cpu.data_reader [i] = read_unmapped;
cpu.data_writer [i] = write_unmapped;
cpu.code_map [i] = &unmapped_page [0];
}

// ROM
// TODO: out of potato chips
for ( i = 8; i < page_count; ++i ) {
cpu.data_reader [i] = read_rom;
int rom_bank = initial_banks [i - 8];
cpu.code_map [i] = &rom [rom_bank * page_size];
eram [0xFF0 + i] = rom_bank;
}
// ...

Oh man, I need to pay my electric bill...

Wasn't it in Eclipse first?

// TODO: remove this line or face retribution

I seem to remember using the TODO list feature in Eclipse before it showed up in Visual Studio. Am I wrong?

Re:Wasn't it in Eclipse first?

Yup, definitely there in my copy of J++ 6.0

yeah, I know. J++ 6.0. I feel suitably ashamed, thank you. ;-)

Re:Wasn't it in Eclipse first?

"It's not like this going to show up in a shipping product"

Are YOU crazy? "TODO" items must be like 98% of their code base. Here is a sample of their kernel that I yanked off the internet:

int main(){
TODO: WinFS
TODO: Trusted Computing
TODO: Network Security
TODO: Usable Kernel
bsod();
exit(-1);
}

Re:Wasn't it in Eclipse first?

The thing about patents is, when one that gets granted that's obvious, everyone
runs around saying "WELL THAT'S OBVIOUS!!"

Yeah, and if you were really as smart as the inventor, you'd have patented it
first.

Just like someone patented sucking dust through a bit of cloth, and now every
house has one of these wonder-machines. There was a patent filed not long back
in the UK for using two little bits of plastic to stop shopping bags slicing
your fingers off. Now *THAT* was obvious - hundreds of people were doing that
with bits of plastic and cartons for years. Patenting it makes it commercially
someone's, as opposed to "used only in your own personal little world"

There are housewives and street bums inventing shit that is *so* obvious, but
they're the only people who go and try. Why? Maybe they're less cynical than
us. When we think "it's obvious!!!!!", we tend to think it's been done before.

Maybe it hasn't. Maybe it has. You gotta check first :D

By the way, your comments in code are not at risk. Neither is your perl script.
Unless by chance you had them all integrated into an IDE, which automatically
detected that you were typing a TODO comment, and added it to a pretty GUI list,
let you jump to the code in question, and so on, in real time. And then you
tried to sell it.

The Eclipse method may not even be at risk, since the patent MS have filed is
quite rightly quite specific in it's application, and does a lot of things
Eclipse does not.

Neko

Re:Wasn't it in Eclipse first?

Yeah, and if you were really as smart as the inventor, you'd have patented it first.

I figure that if I can (and did) come with it independently, then it must be obvious. The fact that the inventor chose to pursue a patent has no bearing on whether it is obvious or not.

This is not a case of hearing about an idea and saying "Oh that's obvious". This is a case of lot's of people (not just me) saying "I've been doing that for years."

Re:Wasn't it in Eclipse first?

You must be careful with which definition of the word "obvious" you are using. The dictionary defintion and the legal definition as interpreted by the US court system are fairly different. For example, the dictionary definition [onelook.com] is given as "easily perceived or understood". The legal definition of obvious is a concept which must be proved and is not open to individual interpretation. See for example, MPEP 2142 Legal Concept of Prima Facie Obviousness [uspto.gov] which states:

To establish a prima facie case of obviousness, three basic criteria must be met. First, there must be some suggestion or motivation, either in the references themselves or in the knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill in the art, to modify the reference or to combine reference teachings. Second, there must be a reasonable expectation of success. Finally, the prior art reference (or references when combined) must teach or suggest all the claim limitations. The teaching or suggestion to make the claimed combination and the reasonable expectation of success must both be found in the prior art, and not based on applicant"s disclosure. In re Vaeck, 947 F.2d 488, 20 USPQ2d 1438 (Fed. Cir. 1991). See MPEP 2143 - 2143.03 for decisions pertinent to each of these criteria.

Something may seem obvious to you (with the benefit of hindsight) and still be nonobvious according to the legal requirements of the term.

Prior Art: Eclipse Project

This feature has been in Eclipse [eclipse.org] for I can recall 2.5 years (not sure on date). The program automatically notices TODO comments in the code and creates a list for you.

What the hell is M$ thinking here?

Re:Prior Art: Eclipse Project

The @todo tag has been an unofficial part of Sun's javadoc utility since at least 1999, possibly earlier. However, I don't think javadoc generated a task list from them.

Re:Prior Art: Doxygen

Doxygen http://www.doxygen.org [doxygen.org] tags can be used to do lists on TODO since 1997. A nice example can is http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/lists.html [stack.nl]

Re:Prior Art: Eclipse Project

This feature has been in Eclipse for I can recall 2.5 years (not sure on date).

Well, Eclipse and its users are in trouble then, because the patent application in question has been filed over 4 years ago. Just a reminder to every developer next time you try to implement a feature in your program, don't forget to search all existing patents and patent applications for possible violations. And another reminder to all software users - you are not immune from patent lawsuits if the software you are using (whether closed or open source) is violating other(s') patent(s) and neither you or your software vendor have a license to use or distribute the patented "technology."

Re:Prior Art: Eclipse Project

"Just a reminder to every developer next time you try to implement a feature in your program, don't forget to search all existing patents and patent applications for possible violations."

This is NOT what one should do when implementing a feature in a program. First of all, developers should not be wasting time with the legal side of software. Most developers do not care for patents. Second, the moment a developer starts sifting through patent portfolios, they are both seeing a solution from the point of view of another developer(s) (or lawyers) and may have a hard time getting past this "better" option and sticking with their own, and they now can not legally say they had no idea the patent existed. I have heard before that even patent lawyers suggest that an inventor/developer not search through patents. What is a developer, a lawyer? No, they are interested in solving problems. Engineers are not interested in making things more complex (and you can not argue that law is about making things simple). Although the process itself may be complex, it is not in the interest of developers and such to complicate things. Fear is what I see in your entire post. Scare tactics. FUD, whatever you want to call it. Let me repeat, DEVELOPERS, ENGINEERS, SCIENTISTS, etc. ARE NOT INTERESTED IN COMPLICATING THINGS. They seek the truth and/or they build machines/software/ideas to solve problems or understand a problem(or event). How many great scientists/developers/engineers do you know that support the patent system? Yes, some will say that we need it, but that it is currently flawed. Yet, even they will admit that they don't have the solution. There have been economists and various other social science professionals on the other hand that are against the idea of the patent system. First you must understand the reasons the patent system was created and why it still exists. You can spout the old myths about progress due to the patent system, but I dare you to show me scientifically (or any other possible, but convincing way) that patents are directly related to progress and I'll give my apologies. I'm very sorry for the rant, but I'm tired of the ignorance behind this patent issue. It is bad enough that people support the system, but to recommend that developers go spend their time sifting through patent files? If the patent system was unenforced though, it would be a great system for sharing knowledge related to inventing/engineering/etc.

Re:Prior Art: Eclipse Project

First of all, developers should not be wasting time with the legal side of software. Most developers do not care for patents.

Can I quote you on that?

Yours sincerely,
Ken Brown, AdTI