This Is Patently Out Of Control!

From the Wintellect blog.

Today, I discovered that Microsoft was filing a patent for “an operator that returns true when two memory addresses are not equal”!
 
 
Surely, we can still come up with better ideas than this to patent, can't we?
Plus, I think there is a lot of prior art around this particular invention.
[Via Wintellog]

What others have said

Requesting Gravatar... Pat Nov 23, 2004 12:47 PM
# re: This Is Patently Out Of Control!
Bill has finally lost it
Requesting Gravatar... Steven Padfield Dec 06, 2004 1:47 PM
# re: This Is Patently Out Of Control!
The purpose, of course, is so that a competitor will not be able to patent it first and sue Microsoft for using it. Most of Microsoft's patents are of this nature.
Requesting Gravatar... Hugh Apr 11, 2005 12:25 PM
# re: This Is Patently Out Of Control!
How can this happen?

If MS publicly use it first, then it cannot be patented subsequently.

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