Toolkit

Story: Microsoft patents widely used IM feature

• 
• 

One wonders if the officials in the US patent office have any coding/"software development" credentials of any kind, or do they just patent everything they see dumped on their desk and leave expensive litigation processes to sort out the men from the boys, with money being the weapon of choice. If such rights are indeed embedded in to the overall system, one can only say... "What a system."

Taking away the generic name IM, a name that has only recently emerged and is based on the consolidation of other technologies/ideas, it surprises me that the US patent office can issue a patent for the sending of a signal -few bytes- over a network, the signal being triggered when a party begins to type in a field. Probably based on about 4 - 8 lines of code, with slight elaborations expanding the underlying base. This is something I'm sure may developers have included in their, not so popular, applications, and do not think it worthy of mention, let alone of a full patent.

In these days, at least under the American system, ingenuity appears to be being discouraged while shrewdness gains control of the whole development process.

Baffling... Is this what we want to see in Europe? Is this what we will be prepared to accept? And what will happen when everybody patents their little 4-8 lines of process dependent code? What a mess....

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Full Talkback thread