Modulator

Microsoft Patent

This may not be a glorious event for the internet and the world wide web.

On Tuesday, nearly 7 years after the original filing date, the US Patent Office awarded Patent 6,632,248 to Microsoft:

User-selected customization information for a network (e.g., HTML) document is stored at a server with reference to user identifying information that uniquely identifies the user. Whenever the user navigates back to the network address of the HTML document, the user is identified automatically and receives a customized HTML document formed in accordance with the customization information.

MS might just toss this in the back drawer and forget it or the courts might toss it out as Stephen S Hong, the primary patent examiner, should have done.

With their deep pockets, though, MS might just try to ram this down peoples throats.

This is another software process patent that does not offer anything particularly unique to the world. And certainly nothing that hasn't been around for years in one form or another.

But, it could impact much of how we interact with folks (individuals or business).

In it's shortest form it says: we, MS, own the process by which a server presents web pages based on individual user preferences. Or, tell me what you want to see, I'll remember it and based on info stored in a cookie on your computer make sure that is what you see the next time you come back.

Do you use AOL or any other portal system? Log on and you are likely served a page prepared for your unique viewing pleasure. Any of these portal based services, in fact any system that utilize cookies (or anything similar) to identify you when you connect may end up owing a dime to MS everytime you use their service.

Stop for a minute....yep, examples are everywhere: waiters do it for their regular customers, Amazon does it for returning account holders and I know a programmer who wrote a budgeting program that returned a unique set of information based on who the accessing user was....in 1969...27 years before this patent was filed. ('persisitant client state' in this case was based not on cookies but physical connection point).

Heck, it even appears to say that MS owns the process by which I provide a unique response to, say, a comment spammer who's IP address is in my block list.

Via beSpacific.

Posted by Steve on October 16, 2003