Instead of focusing on some real problems, now there is word that Microsoft is trying to patent smilies, or the emoticons. This has Mark Taylor, executive director of the Open Source Consortium in a tizzy. “We now appear to be living in a world where even the most laughable paranoid fantasies about commercially controlling simple social concepts are being outdone in the real world by well-funded armies of lawyers on behalf of some of the most powerful companies on the planet. Emoticons are a form of language, and a precedent allowing patenting of language constructs is very dangerous indeed.” I have a suggestion for Microsoft: you get this patent, if you make every single Microsoft user smile for one full day! via P2PNet
Microsoft wants to patent smilies?
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2 trackbacks so far
3:53 PM PT
[...] July 23, 2005 at 5:59 pm · Filed under Musings According to Om (and the US Patents Office), Microsoft wants to patent the emoticons. Now I do [...]
10:21 AM PT
[...] r die Worte! Einen Artikel dazu gibt es bei ZDNet UK News. Der Patentantrag ist hier. Via Om Malik’s Broadband Blog. Permalink [...]
4 comments so far
10:37 AM PT
Wow!.. is this some sort of joke? :)
1:54 PM PT
Wouldn’t AOL have a better claim?
8:31 PM PT
Microsoft? AOL? I was writing :) and :( and the like in the 70s, when those ‘big guys’ of today were still in dipers!!!
2:18 PM PT
Mario, this is a patent application so it is not just about what is done but how it is done. Something tells me your emoticons from the 70s did not involve clicking on something with a mouse or even entering a simple key combination on a keyboard.