More patent silliness from those idiots in the US Patent Office, as they get exploited by soulless corporate types again:
US Patent 7415666: Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments
I really can’t imagine how messrs. Sellers, Grantham and Dersch can sleep at night, having officially claimed that calculating how far to advance down a document when you hit the PageDn is a significant innovation that warrants the protection of 20-year exclusivity that a patent brings. It beggars belief that an engineer could possibly think that way - I’m guessing a company-sponsored discount lobotomisation scheme, or perhaps it’s enough to run internal training courses such as ‘TKNGTHPSS101: Stifling innovation by patenting the bleeding obvious’.
Time to stop this nonsense. Now.
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Hey, its Business - there is no room for pride.
*Sigh*
August 24th, 2008 at 7:58 am
I bet it is a defensive measure - I don’t think they’ve tried to chase after people with patents like that. When you consider all the litigation brought against them, I don’t think it is all that surprising they are a bit defensive.
Personally I think software patents should never be granted to anyone, as copyright should be enough. But in a world that they are granted, and sadly even used as a metric of success (e.g. Saab and Merc adverts), I guess you have got to get as many as you can to protect yourself.
It’s how you use them once you got them that is the interesting test of character.
August 24th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
It’s a shame a company as rich and powerful as Microsoft uses the ‘everyone else is doing it’ excuse though. IBM do it too of course, they’re one of the worst.
The real failing is the entire patent system in the US - allowing business methods and processes to be patented was the dumbest move they ever could have made. Personally I think it’s just a money-making exercise for the patent office, they’d probably let them patent colours if it made them a bit of cash.
It’s like nuclear proliferation - a massive waste of money for things that, if all goes well, will sit in the cupboard doing absolutely nothing. Quite apart from the suppression of innovation, how much time and resources are wasted on patents they hope never to use? It’s a complete farce and until somebody stops using the ‘everyone else is doing it’ excuse, this madness will never end.
What should happen is that all business process patents should be inviolated immediately. Of course, since the patent office has already taken their money, this would cause a massive uproar. Conclusion: the patent office and by inference the US government is to blame, and will eventually have to sort it out. It’s going to cost them millions to do it, and the longer they put it off, the more it’s going to cost.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:27 am
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060515/full/news060515-4.html
Sounds reasonable.
August 25th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Does MS have some kind of employment contract policy where engineers have to come up with patents? Like a patent mill over there.
Dameon what say you?
August 25th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the USPTO getting increasingly sour towards software patents (see: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080728-patent-office-becoming-a-voice-for-software-patent-sanity.html). However, I think we’re still a long way from the USPTO mass invalidating the entire body of software patents, and as things currently stand, some software companies file defensive patents as fast as their little patent drafters can churn the things out. The really crazy thing is that for liability purposes, software developers are told to actively AVOID looking at existing patents, lest you be liable for willfully violating some damn patent when you’re just innocently writing software systems. You’re better off claiming ignorance.
I think that the thing that bothers me most about software patents is that the USPTO seems to be utterly incapable of determining what is too obvious to be in a software patent. Invariably, they approve hundreds of patents for approaches that just about any halfway-decent programmer could have devised, any day of the week, and twice on Thursday afternoon. There’s a much higher risk that Jane Garage Programmer (who can’t afford a lawyer) is going to independently stumble on a software patent than it is for Joe Inventor to accidentally re-invent “ELECTROSTATIC ACTUATORS OF VARIOUS CONFIGURATION WITH BELT-LIKE ELECTRODES TO INDUCE AN IMAGE CHARGE ON A RESISTANCE MEMBER AND CAUSE RELATIVE MOTION” (USPTO 5585683). And trying to work around a patent is pure hell.
For stuff like the pagination patent, I’d say, just ignore it. Given that it was filed in 2005, Adobe ALONE probably has enough prior art on this puppy to toss it out. I’m surprised the guys that filed that thing didn’t get bored to death halfway through, just from the busy work of having to describe this so-called “invention.” I’m not sure how patent reviewers survive reading this dreck. Maybe they don’t!