Fun patent of the day

[Posted August 22, 2008 by corbet]

It seems that Microsoft was awarded patent #7,415,666 on August 19, 2008. The bleeding-edge technology, which was evidently invented around 2005, is: "In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page. For example, if a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be shown in the viewing area starting at the middle of the next page and ending at the bottom of the next page."

Fun patent of the day

Posted Aug 22, 2008 17:14 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (2 responses)

Uh oh, better scrounge the kernel to remove any patent infringements of this one! ;)

Don't forget KSR v. Teleflex

Posted Aug 22, 2008 19:26 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (1 responses)

KSR v. Teleflex puts the legal definition of "obvious" closer to the obvious definition of "obvious" so a lot of the lower-quality software patents are worthless now, probably including this one.

Thousands of lawyers, decades of work, all for nothing.

[[tag haha]]

Don't forget KSR v. Teleflex

Posted Aug 28, 2008 12:28 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

Um, I think this one might have other grounds for invalidity besides obviousness...

They are patenting a formula

Posted Aug 22, 2008 17:35 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Looking at the claims, it appears that they all depend on the use of the following formula:

{[(p-1)/c]h}+r, where p is equal to the number of pages in the document, c is equal to the number of columns of the document which are simultaneously displayed, h is equal to the height of at least the first page, and r is equal to the row offset of the starting point of the first page ...

Fun patent of the day

Posted Aug 22, 2008 18:32 UTC (Fri) by kirkengaard (guest, #15022) [Link]

Alright, I suppose I can see the value in making the paging interface more word-processor
intuitive, as in "page" = one standard-sized paper piece. Which is essentially
re-granularizing the idea of document paging to be paper-page-compliant, as opposed to
more/less where the paging distance is based on display length (arguably more sensible for the
form).

But *patenting* such an obvious notion -- especially in the growing legal environment of
invalidity for "doing the above method in software on a computer" -- seems ridiculous! You're
going to license the idea of interpreting paging commands according to the actual pages of a
document? Amazon.com is calling, they want their lawsuit back.

Now, who do we know that might have done this before 2005? Adobe? Some other PDF-viewer
(like one of ours, where a documented commit might exist)?

Abstracting out the generic elements of a) software on storage medium, b) executed in a
computing environment, and the fact that c) you can't patent math (the equations by which they
calculate position and distance), the specific elements of the patent seem to be a
properly-constructed program/set of programs that displays a document, calculates position and
distance in pixels based on zoom level (which are also a detail that might be generic and
abstractable), and responds to PGUP/PGDN events by moving the current view to the same
relative location on the next or previous print-page representation. For bonus points, they
cover the idea of having variable page sizes within a document, and accounting for
program-generated white-space in the display view.

IOW, it seems they're patenting any piece of software that does print-page-size calculations
on generic hardware using the normal display unit of measure, can be configured to respond to
PGUP/PGDN with print-page granularity on decrement/increment, and has some of the bugs of GUI
implementation worked out.

Fun patent of the day

Posted Aug 22, 2008 19:14 UTC (Fri) by gjvo (guest, #951) [Link] (4 responses)

I think xdvi has had this behaviour for as long as I have used it - late 1980s or so.

Fun patent of the day

Posted Aug 22, 2008 23:53 UTC (Fri) by jonquark (guest, #45554) [Link]

IIRC This mode is called CSR on a zOS box (mainframe)

Fun patent of the day

Posted Aug 25, 2008 8:52 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually, the xdvi I've here scrolls back to the top left of the page on pgup/dn. But gv does it exactly as described, and how old is gv? Development started 1992. The current version is from 1997, this program is too good to need an update ;-).

Fun patent of the day

Posted Aug 25, 2008 19:08 UTC (Mon) by jedbrown (subscriber, #49919) [Link] (1 responses)

-keep (.keepPosition) Sets a flag to indicate that xdvi should not move to the home position when moving to a new page. See also the k' keystroke. This flag is only honoured by the up() and down() actions, not by up-or-previous() and down-or-next().

--keep

Posted Aug 31, 2008 20:36 UTC (Sun) by liamh (guest, #4872) [Link]

Yes, --keep. I always thought this was a great feature of xdvi. Since I have changed over exclusively to making pdfs (pdflatex), I miss this feature as xpdf does not seem to have anything equivalent. It's annoying to have to recenter the page every time a new page is displayed.

Liam

Fun patent of the day

Posted Aug 23, 2008 15:24 UTC (Sat) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (1 responses)

This is almost as hilarious as what I read about back in 1999, concerning the new "innovation" Microsoft had for NTFS on Windows 2000: the "disk file pointer", a file which acted as a transparent link to another file.

That's right, MS was claiming symbolic links as an "innovation". It's a wonder they didn't try to patent the idea then.

Fun patent of the day

Posted Aug 23, 2008 21:16 UTC (Sat) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

> That's right, MS was claiming symbolic links as an "innovation".

Surely that was an innovation, since it was not just a symbolic link, but a symbolic link on NTFS! It must be greatest thought ever.

Brought to you by...

Posted Aug 25, 2008 18:04 UTC (Mon) by WeiMarr (guest, #53554) [Link]

"Maybe, this was brought to you by the same idiots who made the Page Up key move a page down."

;-)
Cited as found in a newsgroup (http://groups.google.de/group/sci.image.processing/browse...)