USPTO Awards LOL Patent To IBM 274
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by
samzenpus
from the wtf-industries dept.
from the wtf-industries dept.
theodp writes "Among the last batch of patents granted in 2009 was one for IBM's Resolution of Abbreviated Text in an Electronic Communications System. The invention of four IBMers addresses the hitherto unsolvable problem of translating abbreviations to their full meaning — e.g., 'IMHO' means 'In My Humble Opinion' — and vice versa. From the patent: 'One particularly useful application of the invention is to interpret the meaning of shorthand terms ... For example, one database may define the shorthand term "LOL" to mean "laughing out loud."' USPTO records indicate the patent filing was made more than a year after Big Blue called on the industry to stop what it called 'bad behavior' by companies who seek patents for unoriginal work. Yet another example of what USPTO Chief David Kappos called IBM's apparent schizophrenia on patent policy back when he managed Big Blue's IP portfolio."
I.B.M. (Score:1, Insightful)
Incredible Bowel Movements
WTF Indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
They've patented a dictionary? That's what it looks like to me.
Did IBM just patent every geek's head? (Score:3, Insightful)
I do those translations in my head. My memory is the database. Does that mean I owe IBM royalties?
I can't believe they just patented the lookup table, albeit in a very specific context.
Re:I.B.M. (Score:3, Insightful)
In Business for Money
Re:Whatis bot (Score:3, Insightful)
See? I bet you thought the W was for WebSphere! (I know I did, until I checked it before posting.)
Re:New rule! (and unintended consequences) (Score:4, Insightful)
With this rule, companies will be motivated to submit as many semi-stupid patents as possible. That way, when the examiner decides that a patent is completely stupid, the other invalidated patent is likely to be a useless one that was created just as patent fodder.
Or maybe incorporate a bunch of shell corporations, and have each of those corporations apply for a single patent at a time. If it is completely stupid, there is no other patent to strike down. If it is granted, the shell corporation will sell it to the real corporation.
Re:IMHO (Score:3, Insightful)
Wasn't it " In my Hesitating Opinion"?
Unless of course the messages deals with the "International Medical Health Organisation"
It's the patent version of World War I (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't blame IBM. They're not "schizophrenic". They are merely in the game playing by the rules as they are written, because that's what everyone else on the field is doing. What if a football team suddenly decided throwing passes was dishonorable, and they wished other people wouldn't do it? They'd get hammered. They'd lose all over the place.
Same for IBM. They can wish for change and still play a mean game. Nothing wrong with that at all. In fact - the more the merrier, says I. Why? Because the more idiot patents like this that get granted, the sooner this mess will end. For two reasons.
First reason - the dumber a patent is, and the more obvious it is that you are merely patenting something someone else came up with - the more likely it is that a judge somewhere will get that clue we've all been waiting for.
Second reason - World War I.
How did WWI start? The assassination of Franz Ferdinand of Austria. A single death. That's all it took. All of the alliances and counter-alliances of the time made an extremely unstable system. All it took was the right nudge, a single assassination, and all those alliances got called up. Countries picked sides and it was off to war. Where 15 million people died. Imagine that. Fifteen million people all killed, and it all traces to a single assassination.
Remind you of anything?
All of these companies today have these IP portfolios, and an uneasy truce in between them that says "you nail us and we'll nail you". Strategic partnerships, licensed IP - a tangled web of legal rights. Just like the tangled web of alliances pre-WWI.
All it will take is our Ferdinand.
Remember the hubub over the FAT file system, how MS holds the patent on it? Why aren't they suing everyone for their legally due royalties? They could nail everyone from Samsung to Nokia. So why not do it? Because everyone would nail MS for other trivial things they are in violation of. It would be Patent WW I.
So let these companies patent trivial crap like LOL. Why not? It will make the crater bigger when The Big One happens. And nobody wants that because in this case it won't be soldiers dying, it will be money evaporating. IP portfolios are insanely overpriced. If PWI happens, the courts will be *swamped*. The only fix will be to invalidate software/process patents or spend every single minute of court time available until 2142 sorting out the mess. And that means those portfolios will suddenly be useless. As will all the license agreements. That's a lot of money to go *poof*. It'll make the housing market bubble of 2008 look like a hiccup. We're talking many many billions of dollars here.
So let the current cold war continue. Go ahead. Patent LOL. Patent emoticons. Patent tying your right shoe before your left - I don't care.
Just know that it's going to end, it's going to end soon, and it's going to end badly. And there will be blame enough to go around for everyone. In fact, the end may be beginning right now. We may have had our Ferdinand just recently. [google.com]
It's going to be a hell of a ride when this whole mess hits the fan.
Re:Summary is wrong, read the patent (Score:1, Insightful)
acrinum? are you retarded?
Re:LOLLERSKATES! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually the way it goes is:
1. Some obscure one-man start-up invents it, unsuccessfully tries to productize it (bad marketing, rough edges etc), fails, and is bought up by bigger fish.
2. A number of companies sell it for a few years, with so-so results.
3. Apple "borrows" the idea and creates a product which is exactly the same, except that its name starts with "i", it is white, and it replaces all buttons with a single "just do it" one in the shape of an Apple logo. Several million are sold in the first year of sales. The name of the Apple device instantly becomes a genericized word for this whole class of devices.
4. The same companies that were selling such devices before "re-invent" them, cloning Apple new design (not very successfully; for some reason, no-one else can quite make it work with a single button) and leaving everything else intact. These are advertised as "i$Whatever killers". Sales go up a little bit, but Apple still pwns everyone.
5. Apple releases a new version - it's exactly the same as old one, only colored black, and costs $50 more. Several million more are sold in the first year of sales.
6. After several years, Microsoft wakes up to see the new market, and promptly announces the development its own product. It will run WinCE, be programmable via XNA, and require a PC with Vista or higher. Available colors are brown and puke green. Sales... wait, there are sales?
7. After one more year, IBM announces that it had the patent for the fundamental idea of the device all along, and OMGPROFITs.
Re:lol = laughing out loud? WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
From the filed doc:
...a group of databases may be provided that each define one or more shorthand terms. These definitions may be structured in the database as shorthand terms paired with longhand terms. For example, one database may define the shorthand term "LOL" to mean "laughing out loud." Another database may instead define "LOL" to mean "lots of laughs." A database may also include multiple definitions for a given term. For example, a user's personal database may have two entries for the shorthand term "OMW" including "on my way" and "oh my word"
IOW, they have managed to patent a dictionary? Prior art, anyone?
Re:Summary is wrong, read the patent (Score:2, Insightful)
I already have prior art to this from at least 9 years ago. Used to do it with mIRC script in irc channels where people insisted on using abbreviations.
In fact:
on ^*:text:*:#:{
echo $color(text) -trn $target $replace($1-,lol,laugh out loud,imho,in my humble opinion)
haltdef
}
Come and get me IBM.
Re:lol = laughing out loud? WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would almost consider this +5 Insightful over +5 Funny due to how true this is.
Re:Summary is wrong, read the patent (Score:1, Insightful)
The telegraph did this a hundred years ago. Semaphore telegraphs did it two hundred years ago. The fact that the translation of the codes is now being done by a computer program instead of a person or a mechanical device is not a novel matter.
Re:lol = laughing out loud? WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
On a development project we banned LOL and insisted on the more accurate LIMH - laughing in my head. No one LOLs online.
Re:It's the patent version of World War I (Score:2, Insightful)
What you are saying completely makes sense, though judging from my experiences as a former IBMer, I'm willing to bet that their actions are more schizophrenic than one might hope. A lot of people don't realize how little communication there is among IBM's dizzying assortment of departments. The problem is in the way the company is structured.
Let's start at the top. When it comes to the large company wide decisions, IBM might not only seem to be adaptable, but downright agile compared to other companies that size. It seems to me like the guys who make the big picture decisions are pretty talented.
They're also so far up the ladder that when it comes to the daily operation of the company, they've got no clue what's going on. They're often more than 5 managers above your average developer.
Down at the other end of the company, you've got lots of really talented (there are always exceptions that make the rule) developers, technicians and other individual contributors that do the heavy lifting. They're often governed by smart dedicated 1st level managers that really know what's going on.
The problem is in the middle. It's like you've got the head of a genius, the arms and legs of an Olympian, and the torso of Mr. Creosote from Monty Python's Meaning of Life. (Let's add one more project manager... he's wafer thin!)
When it comes to the internal processes that IBM uses to conduct business on a day to day basis, they're in the stone age. The layers upon layers of dead-weight middle management seem to have no purpose other than delaying what you're doing so they can say they played a part in it, ensuring that they look good enough in the eyes of the middle manager above them to have a job next quarter. The hordes of inefficient yet needlessly automated processes, completely outdated tools, absurd politics, arbitrary policies and snails pace adaptation of updates and changes to the business processes make it very difficult to actually speak up and make a difference... and given the sheer volume of arbitrary policies that you may be violating at any given time without knowing it, it's not worth speaking up and giving some random middle manager with a grudge leverage to politically manipulate your department. From a practical day to day perspective, you really could view it as a oddly associated bunch of groups, that are bound together by bureaucracy, not dissimilar from the government in Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil.
For example:
Most people on Slashdot are probably aware of IBM's commendable commitment to transfer the entire company to Linux. I was very excited to learn that they had their own company endorsed/controlled internal Linux distro with all of the fixin's (Notes, etc) that we could install on our corporate workstations at our discretion. Being an upper level support guy who did a decent amount of scripting for customers who ran our Solaris based product, it was a much more appropriate choice for me than Windows. Everything worked great(or great-ish. I wasn't picky)! Now to install the ticket tracking system... Their idea of "updating" their ticket tracking system was making a screen scraping GUI that sat on top of a specific windows 3270 terminal emulator. I attempted to learn how to use the cryptic CLI/TUI application directly, but I was told by a support policy manager that the GUI program had been extended in ways that weren't supported by the terminal directly. "No problem" i thought "I'm a wine ninja... I can make it happen," no dice. Oh well, I was sure that they'd be coming out with a Linux version soon. After scouring the company intranet for more information, it turns out that there used to be a Linux version but it was permanently cancelled several years earlier because it was too difficult to maintain both branches. So I posted something in the product's board on the intranet asking if there was going to be a renewed interest in it as support was trying to get going with Linux, and the person who responded to the post (given I have no idea on what level they were inv
Re:Summary is wrong, read the patent (Score:3, Insightful)
It might be obvious to add into a messaging device, but the USPTO would need to find a couple of prior art references that contain all the features and then show a reason to combine them. The PTO doesn't get to just say, "it would be obvious to do that, kneener kneener kneeeener"
Actually, the Patent Office can do that, but they don't. This is what leads to incredibly broad patents.
Originally, a patent was designed to cover a specific method for achieving a result. Today, we have IBM essentially patenting "using a database to automatically look up words in messages received on a computer". Don't think so? The text speaks for itself:
My e-mail client is a "recipient messaging device", and your e-mail client is a "sender messaging device". The text of the patent specifically mentions e-mail. So, pretty much any system that defines "shorthand terms" in an e-mail, text message, HTML page, or any other form of electronic communcation would likely infringe on this patent.
For example, Google or wiktionary.org probably infringe, as you can enter a "text message" like "IMHO" into their search box and have the same result as the IBM patent. And, since neither Google nor anyone else was doing this before 2006 (when the patent was filed), <sarcasm>IBM obviously thought of it first</sarcasm>.
I think IBM should use their tool to look up "BS".