On Sat, 2010-10-09 at 15:01 +0200, Fabrizio Giudici wrote: > http://www.dzone.com/links/r/microsoft_patents_ide_todo_list.html > > "US Patent No. 6,748,582, granted and assigned on Tuesday to Microsoft, > covers the use of a "task list" in a software-development environment. > The patented technology essentially integrates certain comments left in > the source code of an application under development with an accompanying > checklist. Leave a "TODO" comment in the source code, and an authoring > application automatically creates an item in the task list. Check an > item off on the task list, and the corresponding source code comment is > changed." > > > So, now Microsoft is entitled in suing Oracle, the Eclipse Foundation, > IntelliJ and many others.
Looking at http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,748,582.PN.&OS=PN/6,748,582&RS=PN/6,748,582 this patent was filed 2000-03-06 and granted 2004-06-08, which is consistent with the article on the end of the link in the original posting being dated 2004-06-09 Notwithstanding the fact that such a patent should never have been granted (*) I suspect that Microsoft have lost their opportunity to enforce this patent against the likes of Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, CodeBlocks, etc. as these products have had apparently offending features for much of the intervening 6 years -- unless they already have enforced and settled, and it all happened behind closed doors. http://www.latestpatents.com/ is worth watching just to show how many totally fatuous patents get granted, not to mention extremely dangerous ones. Someone really needs to restructure the entire US patent system. (*) One just has to hope and pray that the big corporations, especially the US ones, do not manage to bully other countries into amending their patent systems to be like the US one. Given I am in the UK, my greatest fear is that the UK and EU patent offices succumb to the pressures of the big corporations to widen patent grants. (*) Sadly the US patent system is unlikely to change as it is run by and for the benefit of patent lawyers (who always make money no matter what happens) and secondarily as part of the current business model for large corporations -- cross-licencing for defence, and extortion and demanding money with menaces for offence. If this behaviour was undertaken by individuals not under the protection of the patent system, there would be criminal charges and people would be imprisoned, or at least fined. The patent system makes this otherwise criminal behaviour a standard business model. -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:[email protected] 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: [email protected] London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder
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