arstechnica.com — A small networking services company was recently granted a patent covering the use of representational icons in an operating system. What follows next should be no surprise: a lawsuit delivered to Microsoft, Apple, and even Google, just in time for the holidays.
Dec 26, 2008 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountDec 27, 2008
Icons are representational by their very nature.
bloodboilerDec 27, 2008
The US patent office has a long history of granting patents for obvious stuff that has been in use for decades. I have a vague memory of Altavista getting the patent for thumbnail pictures circa 1999, and absolutely nothing changed after that. I guess these patents are just for lawyers to play sue-me-and-I-sue-you.
sirflibbleDec 28, 2008
It's good for me, being one of those blood suckers. Seriously though sometimes you do your best to tell the client not to do something but if the client insists you're ethically bound to do what they ask. The way I see it is I tell them the logical real world solution, and if they want to spend thousands of dollars pursuing something they wont win I am not going to refuse to take their money.
izzmoDec 28, 2008
@ FKnightNo, that is just plain stupid. You don't offer them the patent and then make companies spend money to revert it because it's the government's fault in the first place. Don't make dumb comments.
izzmoDec 28, 2008
That's what funny about this whole thing... because all the companies involved can prove this! Cygnus Systems... just a bunch of idiots that didn't think through this little debacle.
weebitJan 3, 2009
Of course they got dragged into this they have money! And that is what this lawsuit is all about.
jullimoodApr 13, 2009
hm, this is new style of marketing ....<a class="user" href="http://softwareservicesuae.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/uae-software-services-asp-20-caching-services/">http://softwareservicesuae.wordpress.com/2009/04/1 ...</a>
sequenceApr 18, 2009
OMG, thanks for bringing back Altavista, it was my main search engine long long time ago, and I totally forgot about it!