Microsoft Patents Emoticons
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Kitchen Sink, TechnologyNo…really.
The weird thing is, they didn’t even invent emoticons! Scott Fahlman did:
Between 1981 and mid-1982, emoticons are believed to have been invented (or at least they took hold of the popular imagination) by Scott Fahlman on the CMU bulletin board system. This board was similar in concept to today’s newsgroups or message boards, and was intended as a place for people to chat and have discussions. Scott noticed a problem on the board: people would post a humorous comment, but others would not get the joke. This led to countless flames and meaningless discussions.Scott suggested the use of :- ) to show pleasure (or indicate a joke) and :- ( to show displeasure. This usage caught on like wildfire all over the place, and before long you could see this usage everywhere.
Scott later wrote: “Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a copy of the original post. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. By the time I realized that this smiley-face phenomenon was going to be long-lasting and that it would spread around the world as the Internet grew, it was too late to retrieve the post.”
The post was eventually recovered from a backup tape.
So somebody please explain to me why the patent office okayed this? Because they asked nicely?
If you can read legalese, take a look at the emoticon patent. It’s a doozy. (HT: osopinion
Next up for the Redmond giants? Well, they’re still trying very hard to get that patent on “borrowing” signed off on. They’ve apparently been working on that one for years.
Just kidding Bill! ;- )
UPDATE: 5:49 p.m.
Om Malik has a good post on this emoticon thing too.
UPDATE: 9:22 p.m.
From the comments section, Karl Gallagher says:
Nothing to do with Fahlman’s invention. It’s a way to have custom graphic images for an emoticon displayed at each end. This is about yellow faces with eyelashes, not a “:-)�. Instead of your IM software using a generic face to represent a smiley, your correspondent can pick a custom one and send it to you.
Thanks for the clarification. However, doesn’t it still bother anybody that they’re trying to patent what is essentially a graphic way of communicating emotion?
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 and is filed under Kitchen Sink, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 23rd, 2005 at 8:52 pm
Nothing to do with Fahlman’s invention. It’s a way to have custom graphic images for an emoticon displayed at each end. This is about yellow faces with eyelashes, not a “:-)”. Instead of your IM software using a generic face to represent a smiley, your correspondent can pick a custom one and send it to you.
July 24th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
You cannot say that this has nothing to do with Fahlman’s invention. It is a derivation that depends entirely on Fahlman’s invention.
This is a patent on a combination of things a computer can do.
Computers send images for display on other computers, I see a few on this web page. Computers use symbols to represent other things, like the HTML tag “img” that are telling my browser where to get the images. Computer can show a fall back, like when you add an “alt” (alternative) attribute to display text for text based browsers or accessibility (speaking) software.
This combination of things a computer can do (sending images, sending text, recognizing emoticons) is awarded a patent. That is dangerous.
This is happening more and more. A patent for sending information over the network, but instead of information they are “objects”, and the file format is XML. Is this an invention? No, it’s a common application, but it’s made to sound new because of the use of the latest buzzwords.
Imagine if you could patent story lines. The tragically-flawed hero is obviously unpatentable since it has existed forever. The Department of Homeland Security is brand new, however, so how about patenting the story line, “The tragically-flawed hero who works for the Department of Homeland Security?”
Smilies, done that. Image sharing, done that. Sharing smiley images. Eureka!
The industry is arming itself for litigation. Large firms want to have a huge legal barrier to entry since what they can do, a child can do, or in the case of Linux, a bunch of programmers working in their spare time over the internet.
They are under threat from small firms, individuals, and open source. It is getting easier and easier to switch, so they are looking for a new form of lock in, and that is going to be patents.
They have legal teams patenting all sorts of different combinations of things a computer can do, thus creating a lot of opportunities to initiate litigation. Who ever holds the most patents wins. A start up can be shutdown by sending a patent take down to potential customers (followed by a sales call).
November 13th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
“I would have expected to see something like this suggested by one of our more immature community members as a joke on Slashdot, and probably would have chuckled at the absurdity of the notion. 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.”