Microsoft Frowned at For Smiley Patent
Ingrid Marson,
ZDNet UK,
Jul 25, 2005
With people already raising their eyebrows at the renaming of Longhorn to Microsoft Vista (people especially including those with companies named Vista or products named Vista) the Redmond software company poured oil onto the fire with the news that it is patenting the creation of custom emoticons (aka smileys). "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," said the Open Source consortium's Mark Taylor. I have written about this sort of theft before, which is why I cry foul when it is the people who share files who are branded criminals. Via Slashdot.
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