Microsoft's 2003 patent application for the "Is Not" operator

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220040230959%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20040230959&RS=DN/20040230959

by grellas • 14 years ago

92 51 14 years ago

appft1.uspto.gov

zephyrfalcon• 14 years ago

Reading the title, I immediately thought of Python's "is not" operator as "prior art". However, it seems to me that the patent is specifically about an operator called "IsNot" (one word) used in a BASIC compiler. So that might not be the same at all (but then again, IANAL etc).

Still, it seems a pretty silly patent... :-/

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

> it seems a pretty silly patent

In software, most of them are.

ConceptJunkie• 14 years ago

In software, all of them are. It's like patenting a mathematical formula.

It's bad enough that the USPTO will rubberstamp everything with the right fees, but that they can issue patents on concepts that are far outside the original intent what patents are for.

Yes, developing software involves "invention" in every sense of the word, but if you can patent algorithms, why can't you patent mathematical formulae or proofs?

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

Not only in software: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_exercising_a_cat

The documentary by This American Life about patents had an IP researcher claiming that over 1/3 of all patents ignore prior art, just by comparing identical text between them: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/android-app?destination=radi...

estoppel• 14 years ago

According to PAIR, this has been abandoned for quite some time (4.5 years). In the first action, the Examiner noted "!=" in Java and MS elected not to respond.

Natsu• 14 years ago

Is it specific to a compiler? I wonder if Perl's "unless" is prior art. It's not surprising that this was from back in the day when people at the USPTO couldn't use the internet to research patents.

latch• 14 years ago

Paul Vick, whose name appears on the patent, had a great blog post about this. Had to dig it out of archive.org: https://gist.github.com/1846067

FWIW, as much as I hate[d] VB.NET, Paul Vick was (is?) clearly a superstar - both in terms of coding and writing.

marssaxman• 14 years ago

Totally agree; I went to Microsoft and joined the VB.NET team in no small part because he worked there.

(Didn't work out so well: he left a couple of months later, and that job turned into a nightmare for other reasons.)

danabramov• 14 years ago

Just wondering if you can elaborate on what made your job a nightmare.

sriramk• 14 years ago

Disclaimer: ex-MSFT, have several patents pending from during my time there.

His blog post reminds me why I get so mad at Microsoft using patents against Android OEMs. During all my years at MSFT, employees were always told that patents were necessary for the reasons Paul Vick stated - you had people like Eolas and zillions of other trolls trying to get you and you needed a portfolio to play defence.

With the Android issue, that changed. MSFT suddenly started using patents offensively as a strategic tool. While I totally get why this is smart ( and I'm stunned at how effective it has been), I feel they violated an implicit social contract with a lot of people who worked to get them those patents.

It's going to be interesting to see whether Google does the same swerve down the line and not just stick to using patents in defence.

betterth2• 14 years ago

"It's going to be interesting to see whether Google does the same swerve down the line and not just stick to using patents in defence."

Google is already swerving. They're interested in utilizing the Moto patent portfolio to implement 2.25% of total device cost fees on FRAND patents.

In fact, they're already moving forward with that against Apple, which would net them (based on Q42011 sales) over $500,000,000 a quarter, or in the $1.5-2.0B per year on the iPhone alone.

It's no wonder Google is moving forward: That's likely as much or more money than they make on their own Android OS!

iclelland• 14 years ago

> During all my years at MSFT, employees were always told that patents were necessary for the reasons Paul Vick stated - you had people like Eolas and zillions of other trolls trying to get you and you needed a portfolio to play defence.

No, that can't be right. I hope you're just misremembering that, but the whole problem with patent trolls is that you can't use your own portfolio for defense.

A large patent portfolio is a good weapon against other giants in your industry: IBM, Apple, Oracle, Google, (and once upon a time) Sun. Those people basically can't sue you for violating one of their patents if you have several thousand of your own: they're bound to be in violation of at least one of yours, and it's a mutually-assured-destruction scenario.

A patent troll, on the other hand, doesn't do anything. They can sue you with relative impunity, since there's almost no chance that they're doing anything that you can use against them. The size of your own patent portfolio doesn't even enter the picture.

MoMo999• 14 years ago

"...I feel they violated an implicit social contract..."

Violated what? LOL...Patents are for protecting you from infringement, so you retort/attack when you're patents are abused...What the hell is Apple doing when Samsung/Google got "inspiration" from the iPhone?

MS is built on selling Software and protecting it is their responsibility to their Shareholders!

gkn• 14 years ago

Paul Vick made a new blog post about this today http://panopticoncentral.net/2012/02/16/software-patents-rev...

bhousel• 14 years ago

Better link, includes figures and proper formatting: http://www.google.com/patents?id=m52fAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&...

sgentle• 14 years ago

A question for anyone who quit their career as a patent lawyer to work on formal methods (or vice versa):

Since mathematics isn't patentable, can you invalidate a patent claim by showing that it is equivalent to a mathematical formula? And if so, by the Church-Turing thesis, wouldn't any Turing-complete program be representable in lambda calculus, and therefore be unpatentable?

asmithmd14• 14 years ago

True, you can not patent a mathematical formula but you can patent a machine that uses a mathematical formula to do something and the machine can be a computer.

redthrowaway3• 14 years ago

So I can't patent 'x=x+1', but I can patent a "system, method, and computer-readable medium for incrementing the value of a variable by one"?

DanHulton• 14 years ago

Okay, but we're not talking about the machine - we're talking about the formula/algorithm/program here. Thus, does the defence still work?

AUmrysh• 14 years ago

uhh... "20. The method of claim 15 wherein the source code is BASIC code. "

Really? They patented something for BASIC? Also, I'm pretty sure patents do serve a useful purpose, because first nobody cares about whether something is protected by patent or not, they'll find a way to rip it off. What patents do is put these technologies and developments into the public record.

I think the propriety of patents is problematic, but without them we would potentially be in the dark about how certain new inventions work. It's important for things like medicine, but software patents are a bad idea because they lead to patent trolling and lawsuits over things that are obvious solutions to common problems.

georgefox• 14 years ago

What's really annoying about the IsNot operator is that it's not consistent with TypeOf ... Is. In other words, you can't do this:

    If TypeOf obj IsNot MyClass Then
        ' ...

Instead you have to do:

    If Not TypeOf obj Is MyClass Then
        ' ...

jpkeisala• 14 years ago

I wonder who has patentent exception. That would be pretty great money machine.

Microsoft's 2003 patent application for the "Is Not" operator

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