Microsoft wants to patent smilies
p2pnet.net News:- “Now Bill and the Boyz want to patent smilies,” we said in the original intro to this.
However, they weren’t trying to do that at all, as a Reader’s Write points out.
We’ve left the wording in this post as was, but please go here for a correction and a p2pnet apology.
Methods and devices for creating and transferring custom emoticons allow a user to adopt an arbitrary image as an emoticon, which can then be represented by a character sequence in real-time communication. In one implementation, custom emoticons can be included in a message and transmitted to a receiver in the message. In another implementation, character sequences representing the custom emoticons can be transmitted in the message instead of the custom emoticons in order to preserve performance of text messaging. At the receiving end, the character sequences are replaced by their corresponding custom emoticons, which can be retrieved locally if they have been previously received, or can be retrieved from the sender in a separate communication from the text message if they have not been previously received.
That`s US patent application # 20050156873 with Microsoft Corporation listed as the assignee and Bettina Walter, Thorsen von Seelen and Thorsen Jens as the inventors.
I would have expected to see something like this suggested by one of our more immature community members as a joke on Slashdot, and probably would have chuckled at the absurdity of the notion, ZDNet UK has Mark Taylor, executive director of the Open Source Consortium, saying
But, We now appear to be living in a world where even the most laughable paranoid fantasies about commercially controlling simple social concepts are being outdone in the real world by well-funded armies of lawyers on behalf of some of the most powerful companies on the planet.
“Emoticons are a form of language, and a precedent allowing patenting of language constructs is very dangerous indeed.”
Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) Jonas Maebe is quoted as saying Microsoft could use a patent like this to prevent competitors from developing applications that compete with its MSN Messenger application and, “It is unfortunately quite clear such patents have nothing to do with protecting investments nor R&D, and only with obtaining exclusion rights which can help them [Microsoft] maintain their dominant position in the market.”
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See:-
ZDNet UK – Microsoft frowned at for smiley patent, July 22, 2005
July 23rd, 2005 at 6:56 pm
I must have taken a looooooong nap… I remember it wasn’t long ago that patenting was someting to do with protecting new stuff… since when is a smiley included in a message (like email) a new thing?
How about prior art? What’s next – someone patenting fork and spoon?
July 23rd, 2005 at 9:15 pm
Yesterday while surfing the net I blundered on a place to download animated 3D smilies by (you guessed it) MSN. Get them here free it said. Ok, I attempted for the heck of it to do so. Admittedly, I was curious as to how many and what they were. Amazingly, I found that it would not do so. I got instead that MSN didn’t support my browser. Imagine that? I run Linux.
The whole patent granting machine has gotten completely out of hand. I think it was last year, microsucks patented the double click function for opening programs. This is a very basic skill needed to operate the computer and has no reason to be able to grant mircosucks a patent on it. They just as well go ahead and patent the qwerty keyboard while they are at it. By patenting the double-click, what has been done is denying the computer world a standardized method of implementation. This isn’t an advantage anyone and certainly should not have been granted.
The idea that microsucks should be able to receive a patent on smilies is absurd. Smilies have been around since the days of text messaging in the early days of the internet. Microsucks didn’t invent that, people did. Here you have another grab, not at something they invented and not for something they will gain profit from but rather to deny the average programmer some tool to make internet experience an enjoyable experience. This too, will result in breaking down any attempt at a standard for the world that isn’t in microsucks best interests.
So whats next, a patent on food, air, and water? Oh wait, I forgot, Monosoto already has a patent on some of that, don’t they?
July 23rd, 2005 at 11:14 pm
http://www.modern-communism.ca/mc21103.htm
July 24th, 2005 at 11:10 am
Imaging what happen if the supreme court had granted that the windows display patent to apple ?.
Then MS will not exist.
MS has forgotten about peoples’ need.
All is about $$$$$$$.
July 24th, 2005 at 1:25 pm
The headline is wrong – this is not about patenting smilies! If the author would have read the patent application cited in the article, he would have found that the inventors do not want to patenting smilies. Instead the invention is about adding complex emoticons to a lean message without increasing the data size of such a message. In other words, this new technique helps to keep chatroom conversation or instant messaging performing fast.
July 24th, 2005 at 3:19 pm
All words and letters in this article (except fire and wheel) are (c) Microsoft. All Rights Reserved.
July 25th, 2005 at 2:45 am
Quick: Someone in the Linux community patent the GUI, then allow only GPL OS’s to use it.