Microsoft Seeking Paid Spam Patent

from the sounds-familiar dept

theodp writes "On Thursday, the USPTO revealed that Bill Gates' pay-to-spam scheme is patent-pending and calls for ISPs like MSN to receive a fee from both senders and recipients of spam." Of course, as we mentioned when Gates first came up with this suggestion, others had talked about very similar things in the past, so it's hard to see how this is patentable by Microsoft (the patent was filed a month after Gates' talk). In the meantime, we're still waiting to see all our spam go away, as Gates thought his plan would work within two years, which is a point we've almost reached. Maybe he was just waiting for the patent to come through.

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