Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Sep 2008 23:23 UTC
The US patent might be a bit daft, especially when it comes to software, but it does offer some interesting insights into what crazy things the big companies might be working on for future products. One such patent emerged today: Microsoft applied in 2005 (and was granted in 2008) a patent which describes how different windows may be coloured differently, or that they may have different transparency settings. This sounds a bit weird, but it may actually prove to be quite useful.
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Member since:
2007-02-07
They are not patenting the concepts of opacity or colored windows. It's just one specific method of providing such functionality and from what I understood, Windows dependent.
They even state that similar feature exists on other OSs and this is basically a different implementation of the same idea.
I'm perfectly fine with patenting "methods", as the real danger is when a "concept" gets patented. IBM and Microsoft and other multi-billion dollar corporations are delicious targets for patent trolls. Stuff like this are more about protecting themselves.
Edited 2008-09-09 00:40 UTC