Larkware
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Stupidest. Patent. Ever.

By Mike Gunderloy
Monday, January 20, 2003

I have no idea what the US Patent & Trademark Office's examiners are up to these days. Were it not for slander laws and a respect for our four-legged cousins, I'd speculate that it involved farm animals. There must be some explanation as to how they can continually grant patents on common user interface widgets. Case in point: US Patent 5,933,841, "Structured Document Browser."

In the lovely language of patents, here's the first claim:

1. In a computer, a browser for viewing documents having embedded codes that identify parts of documents according to at least one predefined document structure, said browser comprising:

a user interface comprising a display window that displays a document to a user;

a plurality of input devices;

a first plurality of display regions that are responsive to said input devices, said display regions of said first plurality being continuously displayed as part of the user interface automatically and configured to correspond to respective parts of the predefined document structure regardless of what part of the document is in the display window; and

a controller operative to cause a selected part of the document to be displayed in the display window when a user uses one of said input devices to enable one of said display regions that corresponds to the selected part.

Just in case you're not fully up on reading patent language, that means that if your Web site uses frames, and there's a navigation frame on one side, with links that load content into the main frame -- you're violating their silly patent, and they can come after you for licensing fees. And yes, they are coming after people: see the legal documents that MuseumTour.com has posted.

This is so staggeringly stupid that it's difficult to know where to start, other than with the obvious observation that the USPTO has no business granting this sort of junk patent.

 

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

 For all too much more on bad software patents, see Internet Patent News.

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