Comments on: Microsoft Attempts to Patent the Very Essence of Humanity

By: Gray Gaffer

Gray Gaffer — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:40:45 +0000

You may be right. I remember encountering one person waaay back who had apparently by use of oblique language convinced the Patent Office to grant him a patent on using character buffers in front of UAR/T logic. In 1984. When the GIANT chip did exactly that in 1972. So M$ may even get their patent granted and be relying on their $ to protect them from challenge. Do you by any chance have a reference to the actual application? Seeing the claims might raise even more interesting points.The Abstract is an abbreviated form of the preliminary discussion that describes the domain, operating considerations, and other relevant Art including other patents that this one may extend or need to avoid. It precedes the actual claims of the invention. It is non-binding in that only the claims themselves form the patent, with Claim #1 being the most fundamental and the others building on it. The other stuff can be changed at pretty much any time, and is really considered primarily a teaching aid in the sense of “teaching the art”.My experience: I am named inventor on five software patents (so far). Patents rather than trade secrets because that is how the management thought. I myself am not so gung-ho on software patents; while I know such things were not even thinkable when the Patent Office was instituted, Patents were specifically intended to protect products, not ideas. A process is an idea. A mousetrap is a product. You can not patent the idea of catching mice with a device. You can only patent a specific device, e.g. how the trap is sprung, how the mouse is then contained. Anybody else is then free to invent their own mousetrap, as long as they use a different method for springing the trap and containing the mouse. And they can patent that too.Interestingly enough, the PO seems to use the syntactical form of the patent language to define what is patented, rather than its semantic content. It is possible, especially with software patents, to manipulate them simply by choice of words. I suspect this derives from their method of identifying potential infringements. In the UAR/T case I mentioned above, we enjuneers are typically naive enough to think that something we did is so obvious an extension of the art that it is not patentable, and so don’t patent it. Then along comes some joker like that who takes advantage of the fact that no patents exist and uses language to point the PO away from existing art (which voids the “novel” part of patentability). Sometimes these tricks even work to the extent of sustaining challenge: back in the 80’s somebody – I forget who – patented the use of a blank front panel on rack-mounted outboard audio processing gear. Along came we, putting networked computers behind our front panels and moving all the UI to the PC. To avoid infringement challenge we had to put a reset button on the front. We were not alone. Their advantage? manufacturing cost. Ours? a UI that was actually usable. Different focus, I guess.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:56:02 +0000

What is quoted is significantly more than the “intro” …I’m not sure about process vs. how to do a process, but I don’t think that this patent is intended to protect anything. I think this is an attempt to have a patent pending that can be used to scare others into giving up on trying to compete with microsoft. That may not be very logical, but when the suits show up in numbers, they can be very scary, I assume.

By: Gray Gaffer

Gray Gaffer — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:16:13 +0000

Has the qualification for a patent award changed when I was not looking? Although what was quoted was the non-binding introduction, and it would be perhaps more pertinent to see the actual claims, my understanding-from-experience of patents is that processes can NOT be patented, only specific manifestations of implementing them. In particular, that a typical practitioner of the art patented can, from the patent and its citations alone, implement and demonstrate a working instance of that which is patented. In other words, the patent must “teach the art” that is patented in a practical way.Of course, this is M$, and that $ has significance in this domain.

By: Alan Kellogg

Alan Kellogg — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:58:16 +0000

Trust Microsoft to turn patents into bloatware.Let’s try the other end of the complication spectrum. Your goal is to answer the following questions.What does the program do?How does it do it?

By: Robert Ward

Robert Ward — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:49:33 +0000

Strange…don’t they have enough market share? Do they really need to expand into the brain, or mind?

By: DaleP

DaleP — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:08:37 +0000

This is only and application at this time.http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220080134132%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20080134132&RS=DN/20080134132See Ars Technicahttp://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080609-microsoft-brain-lateralization-patent-all-about-software-qa.html”Microsoft brain lateralization patent all about software QA”

By: Christian

Christian — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:58:32 +0000

Weird. What specifically are they trying to get patented? The method with which all software is designed? Is there a source for this abstract? It would be very interesting to spend more time on this subject….