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Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick

Tue, Apr 6th 2004 1:49pm





Microsoft Patents Saving The Name Of A Game

from the yeah,-that's-non-obvious dept

theodp writes "As if there weren't enough dodgy patents, here's an excerpt from one granted to Microsoft Tuesday for a Method and apparatus for displaying information regarding stored data in a gaming system: 'When saving a game, the saved game data may include a descriptive name of the saved game, a graphic representation of the state of the game when the game was saved, a description of the game state when the game was saved, and a date and time that the game was saved.'" I'm trying to figure out if there's more to this patent, but the more I read, the worse it seems. How is this possibly "non-obvious"?

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    John Noble, Apr 6th, 2004 @ 2:45pm

    The old way was a blank space that you had to fill in. The patent apparently covers default entries, drawn from various tags, which you see now in Microsoft Word as well, tagged with the first words of the document. Everything is obvious in retrospect.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: No Subject Given

    icon
    Mike (profile), Apr 6th, 2004 @ 2:54pm

    Actually, many things aren't at all obvious in retrospect. I'm constantly amazed at the true innovations I see or read about on a daily basis.

    Explain to me how filling in a default name is non-obvious.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: No Subject Given

    identicon
    Richard, Apr 6th, 2004 @ 3:29pm

    And here I'm looking at my copy of Outcast, the back has a copyright date of 1999 (publisher is Infogrames). Its savegames have little snapshots, and the date. IIRC it also suggests a name, but I might be wrong there. So in essence, Microsoft *may* have extended this prior art by adding an automatically-generated name. Wow. Those guys sure are smart.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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