Fergie's Tech Blog

Microsoft frowned at for smiley patent

Thanks to a post over on /. which pointed this out. This goes to show you just how out of whack the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office really is in handing out patents...

Ingrid Marson writes on ZDNet UK:

Various organisations have criticised Microsoft for attempting to patent the creation of custom emoticons.

The patent, which was published by the US patent office on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.

Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium, said on Friday said this is such a basic concept that he would not have been surprised to see it posted as a fictional patent on a technology site.

posted by Fergie @ 7/23/2005 06:48:00 AM