Re: Santa Brings Microsoft Patents for Editing, Compiling Code

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 22:36:35 -0800, theodp wrote:

> --> Links at http://techdirt.com/articles/20041228/1137206_F.shtml
> 
> Santa Brings MS Patents for Editing, Compiling Code Contributed by Mike
> on Tuesday, December 28th, 2004 @ 11:37AM from the
> good-work,-patent-examiners dept.
> 
> theodp writes "Courtesy of the USPTO, Microsoft found two new patents
> under the tree this holiday season. The first covers 'Editing a software
> program in a common language runtime environment,' while the second lays
> claims to 'Compiling multiple source language files that share a common
> library,' which must come as a real shocker to members of the DEC
> OpenVMS Common Language Environment, IBM Language Environment (LE), and
> IBM Integrated Language Environment (ILE) teams. Gotta teach those
> patent examiners to use Wikipedia instead of Microsoft Encarta for their
> prior art searches!"

There is no way those examiners can innocently grant so many bogus patents
to Microsoft.  No one can be this stupid.  There is absolutely no doubt
that MS is buying these patents.

The sheer brazenness of such corruption is shocking, but I guess the
corruption really got started when they decided to grant patents for
ideas in the first place.  It used to be a truism that you couldn't patent
ideas, and for all the right reasons.  What the hell has happened?