While I do agree this patent is a terrible thing and an example of how broken the USPTO is, it should be said that this is NOT a patent on the mouse "double-click" as many have reported it to be. The patent is for PDA's and their buttons.
<a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=109792&cid=9320840">An informative post about this on Slashdot:</a>
Quote:
Before I take my life into my hands and play devil’s advocate here:
<disclaimer>I think this is a stupid patent and is not sufficiently original to truly deserve protection</disclaimer>
That being said, those who read the patent application [uspto.gov] very carefully will notice that this patent isn’t for the general idea of double-clicking, but rather covers a much smaller range. Specifically, Microsoft has been granted a patent on a PDA-type device (“limited resource computing device”) that has physical buttons on the outside of the device (i.e. “Mail”, “Calendar”, “Contacts” etc) that cause different actions to occur based on how long or in which sequence they are pressed.
An example of the patented method in action would be if you created a device on which pressing the mail button once would open a list view of recent emails, pressing and holding it for 2 seconds might initiated a POP3 session to the server, “double-clicking” the button might bring you to a “new email” form, and pressing and holding the button longer than 3 secs would be assume to be accidental and would do nothing.
This does NOT appear to be relevant to any non-PDA device, nor does it appear to apply to any kind of buttons that do not physically exist on the outside of the device. I still think it’s pretty stupid and obvious, but it’s nearly so stupid as it would appear at first glance.
That being said, does anyone have any specific prior art to overturn this with?
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