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Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick

Wed, Dec 14th 2005 6:13pm





Microsoft Granted 1-Click Pausing Patent

from the because-we-needed-more-clicking-patents dept

theodp writes "Christmas has come early to Microsoft. After a 12-year battle with the USPTO, the software giant has been granted a patent for Pausing television programming in response to selection of hypertext link, an invention which 'enables a viewer to arbitrarily pause a television program, access a computer network such as Internet, explore the content available at the viewer's leisure and then resume viewing the program at any time without missing any of it.' Handling the patent for Microsoft was Rick D. Nydegger, Chair of the USPTO's Patent Public Advisory Committee." It would seem like this is the sort of thing that Tim Lee was just talking about. It's a software patent on an idea so obvious that most people wouldn't even bother thinking about it. If you're going to include an interactive functionality within a video where someone would click on something, of course you'd want to pause the video playback when someone clicked.

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  1.  
    identicon
    discojohnson, Dec 14th, 2005 @ 7:15pm

    No Subject Given

    i think this is more of a societal problem in that if MS doesn't patent it someone else will and then there would be a problem for MS. i agree it's a messed up practice, but businesses are forced to keep the practice going to protect themselves from trolls. it's going to keep going this way (and probably to a degree we haven't yet thought of) until the patent office is changed.

     

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

  2.  
    identicon
    citizenr, Dec 14th, 2005 @ 8:36pm

    apple

    so is that why quicktime does not pause when i click on a video with embedded hyperlink?

     

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

  3.  
    identicon
    Philip, Dec 15th, 2005 @ 12:42pm

    Re: No Subject Given

    I'll go for that, IF and ONLY if MS doesn't attempt to sue people that use this same method. However, we all know very well they will attempt to sue.

     

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

  4.  
    identicon
    Sv, Dec 16th, 2005 @ 1:30am

    Re: No Subject Given

    Do you have example where MS sued over stupid patent? I think in most cases they are the ones getting sued over a stupid patent, which in turn forces them to patent more stupid patents lately.

     

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


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