23 Jul 2005
Microsoft Frowned at for Smiley Patent

As if patenting the smiley wasn't bad enough, M$ is apparently trying to secure patents on tokenizers. These common routines are at the heart of compilers and interpreters - every programming language has a tokenizer of some sort at it's very core. They hedge their bets with a lot of talk about "natural language", but reading through the abstract seems to imply much broader applications. What unmitigated chutzpah!

ZDNet UK reports on criticism of Microsoft's attempt to patent the creation of custom emoticons. 'I would have expected to see something like this suggested by one of our more immature community members as a joke on Slashdot,' quipped Mark Taylor of the Open Source Consortium. '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.'

(link) [Slashdot]

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