Friday, March 25, 2011

The Microsoft Suit against Android apps - these are patents?

Microsoft is suing Barnes and Noble and other companies making Android-powered devices.  Geekwire enumerates the patents allegedly violated.  Read them.  Geez, these are patents?  6891551, Selection handles around selections was patentable in 2005?  Hasn't that been around forever?  5778372, Delayed downloading of web images?  Isn't that pretty much what ALT is for?  At least that patent is from 1998, where I can vaguely imagine it was novel.  6957233, annotating a read-only file by noting the location in the file.  That was novel is 2005?

I don't know, maybe child windows were novel in 1999?.  5,889,522.