Darren New wrote:
> Oh, I see. Like this.
> 
> http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/07/17/sparklines-in-excel.aspx
> 
> That said, the "primary inventor" blogs that someone else already 
> invented them and published them in a book, so I'm not real sure about 
> that whole perjury thing with asserting you've invented it yourself goes.

AFAIK Tufte invented sparklines, but I haven't seen them used in 
spreadsheet software before, so maybe Microsoft is claiming that it's 
the way they've integrated them into a spreadsheet that's new?

In any case, I don't think it's worth worrying too much about these 
specific patents except as symptoms of a broken software patent system. 
  It's my understanding that most large sortware companies try to patent 
everything they can and developers are actively *discouraged* from 
trying to determine if someone else has invented it before (since 
there's apparently larger fee for infringing on a previous patent in 
that case).

I've heard that the reason for this is because, since software patents 
are sort of broken, it's almost unavoidable every large company has tons 
of patents on things used by the other companies (and probably 
independently invented there).  This having a large bucket of your own 
patents provides sort of a "mutually assured destruction" scenario where 
one company can't attempt to sue another for patent infringement without 
suffering a massive counter-suit.  So it's not necessarily the case the 
MS even intends to enforce these patents, but rather they're just part 
of this "patent everything" process.

I've heard most of this second hand, to take it with a bit of a grain of 
salt, but it certainly does explain why there's so many ridiculous 
patents but comparatively few cases of the (major) companies suing 
everybody for infringing on them.  Also, any patent system in which this 
is a standard strategy pretty clearly has some major problems, so I hope 
it's fixed someday.

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