Notoriously Famous Trivial Software Patents

Bad patents, also referred to as trivial patents, are “patents that cover either trivial inventions or inventions that would have been obvious to persons of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made.”

Bad patents are especially widespread for the software industry. The reason that bad patents exist is because patent examiners, unfortunately, do not have a comprehensive knowledge set of the software technology they are examining. The humongous amount of software can allow some bad patents bypass examiners even though these patents are only some trivial extensions of existing software patents.

Currently, Apple and Samsung, among many other smartphone manufacturers, are constantly accused of being granted trivial patents.

In the blog post, I want to explore some notoriously famous trivial patents and their obviousness.

XOR flashing cursor

The first one is XOR-draw for screen cursors. The XOR patent covers the use of the machine language XOR (which is short for a logical operation: exclusive or) operator to make a cursor blink in a bitmapped display. In another word, it’s a patent for a flashing cursor on a computer screen using XOR language. This patent is definitely on the top of the list of patent nonsense. First of all, it was actually filled long after almost every computer graphic company already knew how to use it. But firms in the early days simply didn’t bother to file a patent for such a thing that’s so trivial. Any given software program is comprised by numerous pieces of technologies like this one. One critic said, “It would be absurd to grant patent privileges to each such idea.”

However, USPTO did approve this patent, and many tech companies are paying loyalties towards it:

Autodesk had to pay $25,000 to ``license'' this patent;

Amiga CD32, the first 32-bit CD-ROM based video game console, went bankrupt since they were not able to pay $10M in patent royalty for their use of XOR patent.

You can view this patent here: http://www.google.com/patents/US4197590

Amazon 1-Click

“1-Click shopping removes the single biggest friction point for completing an online purchase: the checkout process…In fairly broad terms, it protects any E-commerce transaction executed with one-click using stored customer credentials to validate.”

There is no doubt that 1-Click has generated a huge amount of additional sales for Amazon, since now customers don’t have the time for a second thought before they click through the transaction. And since credit card information is already stored in the system, customers, supposedly, would feel less guilty about spending money on things they probably don’t need.

Within the US, Amazon has sued under it (Barnes and Noble) and they are also licensing it (to Apple, who uses the patent in iTunes store). However, 1-Click never get passed in Europe.

"The Board does not consider that the idea of reducing the number of steps necessary to make an order would contribute to inventive step," the EPO said.

You can view this patent here: http://www.google.com/patents/US5960411

Google Doodles

Doodles are the customized version of the Google logo that the company puts on its home page to celebrate holidays and other events. Well, for this patent, how trivial it is, you go figure.

You can view this patent here: https://www.google.com/patents/US7912915