:-)

[shankar]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/leg...9210396,00.htm

Microsoft frowned at for smiley patent

Ingrid Marson
ZDNet UK
July 22, 2005, 17:15 BST

Various organisations have criticised Microsoft for attempting to patent the creation of custom emoticons.

The patent, which was published by the US patent office on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.

Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium, said on Friday said this is such a basic concept that he would not have been surprised to see it posted as a fictional patent on a technology site.

"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. 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," said Taylor.

He said the patent could be particularly problematic as it covers basic human communication. "Emoticons are a form of language, and a precedent allowing patenting of language constructs is very dangerous indeed," said Taylor.

Jonas Maebe, a spokesman for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), said that such a patent could be used by Microsoft to prevent competitors from developing applications that compete with its MSN Messenger application.

"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," said Maebe.

Such patents are in contradiction to the original purpose of the patent system, according to Maebe's colleague at the FFII, Felipe Wersen.

"Patents were ultimately designed to benefit society — to have companies disclose things that benefit society which they wouldn't otherwise disclose. Who does this patent benefit?" said Wersen.

Although Microsoft does not appear to have filed this patent in Europe, it has filed a number of patents around natural language. These include a patent for segmenting text strings into tokens to allow further language processing.

Microsoft was unable to comment in time for this article.The Microsoft patent that organisations are concerned about is patent number 20050156873, which was filed in January 2004.

[age_master]

thats ait of a worry

[luckyeddie]

Can I patent the letter 'M' then?

[Top_Cat]

I'm personally in the act of patenting the act of breathing. It's a growing industry (more people around the world, after all) and everyone does it. I'll make BAZILLIONS!!

[luckyeddie]

Originally Posted by Top_Cat

I'm personally in the act of patenting the act of breathing. It's a growing industry (more people around the world, after all) and everyone does it. I'll make BAZILLIONS!!

It'll not last.

More a case of ......

Air today, gone tomorrow

(sorry)

[SJS]

Indians should patent the art of spitting.

[Adamc]

Originally Posted by shankar

Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium, said on Friday said this is such a basic concept that he would not have been surprised to see it posted as a fictional patent on a technology site.

Originally Posted by SJS

Indians should patent the art of spitting.

Did someone mention Mark Taylor?

[Samuel_Vimes]

Originally Posted by Top_Cat

I'm personally in the act of patenting the act of breathing. It's a growing industry (more people around the world, after all) and everyone does it. I'll make BAZILLIONS!!

Uh oh. Capitalizt Corey. Run for your lives...

[vic_orthdox]

So - when is someone going to close this thread for a breach of copyright?

[Behlol]

u are a mod.why dont u close it???????????

[vic_orthdox]

Originally Posted by Behlol

u are a mod.why dont u close it???????????

Haha. I'm just being a smart alec mate

Anyways, this seems like the appropriate thread at the moment to get annoyed at Microsoft.

My laptop has been playing up for a while (battery/charging related) and after I got it "fixed" - not that it has been, at all, just made a little less severe - I tried to get onto MSN. Told that the version wasn't new enough for me to do anything with it at all, I went and downloaded the new MSN which must be massive, because it took me a good 3/4 of an hour (stupid slow dial-up).

Then when I went and tried to set-up MSN, they wouldn't allow me to because I needed Internet Explorer 6.0. Luckily, I had IE 6 on a CD for another application I had bought, so I went to install it, but because I was waiting on the computer to be restarted on my (non-working) installation of MSN it wouldn't install.

So I checked that the MSN file was in the TEMP folder - which it was, and then restarted the computer. After I did that, I was allowed to install IE 6.0, and then went to search for my MSN file which was no longer there, and so now I have to re-download the MSN file. Which is really annoying, because CW is already pushing me to my download limit, and this will surely push me over the line.

[Top_Cat]

Give this a go;

Gaim

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

What is Gaim?

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/about.php

Download a Win version from;

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/downloads.php

It supports many chat protocols, isn't browser dependent, works on multiple platforms, is open-source and is about a 7Mb download. I use it on Linux and it works just fine. It doesn't have every nifty feature that the original MSN has but they catch-up eventually.

[vic_orthdox]

Oh, just thought I'd add...

Got to about 4 bars left out of the 30 or so recording the download progress, and then the internet cord fell out of the computer

I'm currently one very very angry man. And I need to go to sleep - first lecture for the semester in 8 hours.

[Rich2001]

Originally Posted by vic_orthdox

Oh, just thought I'd add...

Got to about 4 bars left out of the 30 or so recording the download progress, and then the internet cord fell out of the computer

I'm currently one very very angry man. And I need to go to sleep - first lecture for the semester in 8 hours.

Does MSN not support resume?

[vic_orthdox]

Originally Posted by Rich2001

Does MSN not support resume?

It appears (at least to my limited IT skills) not.