Comments on: SONY’s New Patent Gets Canned By Spam Filters

by: BJ Gillette

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 11:50:20 +0000

Nowadays, if you don’t patent your code, someone down the road will be suing you down the road for using it. Unbelievable.

by: K. R. Cronin

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 03:05:58 +0000

What is it that possesses corporations to patent every single idea they can possibly come up with to annoy users?

by: BJ Gillette

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 09:44:36 +0000

Hi Wade.
You, sir, are preaching to the choir. AAAAAmen.

by: Wade

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 09:19:46 +0000

This is a good example of what is wrong with the patent system.
While I know Sony would never get to collect royalties, the god’s honest truth of the matter why should they even be able too. Having an idea and running to the patent office before anyone else has the idea is a flawed system to me. Those countless spammers did not go look at the Sony patent and to figure out what they wanted to do with spam and scripts. They had those ideas all on their own.
I am perfectly fine with the guy who invented the baseball to get a patent, but I don’t want to see patents for how to throw a baseball fastball and another for the slider, etc… Sony never should have been granted a patent.
This system of “get rich schemes” and a race to the patent office just makes me sick.

by: BJ Gillette

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 08:57:09 +0000

Hi Sean.
Can’t disagree with a single word… not one.

In today’s Wall Street Journal (19 April), Holman Jenkins noted Metabolite’s patent for discerning how blood responds to Vitamin B deficiency: “Had Isaac Newton been granted such a patent for gravity, nobody would have been able to fall down without paying him royalties.”

Software patents are just as evil. As one of my colleagues said, “How do you know if you’re violating somebody’s patent? You’re programming.”

Which is, again, why the Patent Office needs a good whuppin’.

by: Sean McManus

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 03:15:03 +0000

There is a role for this, in a closed corporate environment where you can control the client software and how it is configured. It could be used for example to force employees to respond in a timely manner to urgent customer service requests. I’m not saying it’s desirable, and obviously nobody would choose to install it on a public-facing email account. But this does appear to be a patent with commercial value, even now.

by: BJ Gillette

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 09:13:13 +0000

RE: "Prior art, obvious? Take your pick ... This patent should never have been issued."

If it was possible to hug you across the Internet, I would.

Unfortunately, this has spun out of control.

Even companies that refrained in the past are now patenting anything that moves just to maintain their ability to use it without paying blood money.

USPTO needs a good whuppin'.

by: BJ Gillette

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 09:06:26 +0000

“Were they going to make you have to force quit the entire application if you didn’t want to respond?”

Simply disabling scripts undoes the whole process.

By its granting in 2006, the patent seems almost humorous, especially for the purposes stated in the application, like insisting on response to party invitations, or updating an Othello board.

Intervening security crises have changed both users’ and managers’ thinking about what’s useful, allowable and tolerable.

What a difference 5 years makes.

by: Anonymous Reader

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 08:55:04 +0000

Prior art, obvious? Take your pick.

Who knows! Maybe we can get Senators in the Judiciary who are meeting this month on IP issues, to look at the as another excuse to ban software and business method patents.

This patent should never have been issued.

by: Robert Claypool

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 22:54:23 +0000

What? Were they going to make you have to force quit the entire application if you didn’t want to respond?