TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Dumb patent of the month: Emotional Context

Okay, I'm not even sure if this is a real patent or not: http://www.patentauction.com/patent.php?nb=7385 It's a "Method of Adding Emotional Context to Electronic Messages". They want $10,000 for a license, but it comes with a free dotcom domain name!

The "patent number" referenced doesn't lead anywhere searching with Google or the US patent search, so who knows if this is real. It wouldn't surprise me. The site itself is probably a scam site, it looks pretty shady to me, but I have no idea. Anyway, let's just look at it and mock it. (I could have picked the Linked List patent or the Cat Chasing Laser patent if I wanted a real patent, but those have been mentioned before. I'll try harder next month if I remember. (Not that it's hard to find a bogus patent in any field that should never have been granted.))

This patent is nothing but an assertion of monopoly rights over how to style text to convey emotion. Luckily my use of italics there doesn't violate it, as we shall see.

Italic text designates sarcasm. (Personally I prefer the tilde at the end of sentences when I want to make sarcasm explicit. But hey, to each their own.~)
Red text is for angry text!
Blue text is for sad text.
Pink text is for "loving" text.
ALL CAPS TEXT IS FOR VERY URGENT TEXT!!!
Bold text designates that I'm being very serious right now, Mr.
Green text is for happy text!
Purple is...flirtatious. Ooh la la.
This is not an uncolored link, but very Important Text.
And orange text is for being excited. Obviously.

Their patent (if it's real) is over any system that lets the user select/deselect emotions to make those things happen to the text. Literally 5 minutes of work with radio buttons and jquery. It's not even over something modestly interesting like a natural language processing algorithm that infers emotion from text.

Get rid of patents.


Posted on 2012-07-11 by Jach

Tags: intellectual property, patents, stupidity

Permalink: https://www.thejach.com/view/id/256

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