Via Conceivably Tech, we learn that Microsoft was granted a patent for the shutdown procedure in Windows. If I understand it right, Microsoft is now the sole owner of the procedure asking whether you really want to close an application with unsaved data.

Note that the patent does not seem to cover the most annoying aspect of a Windows shutdown, the never ending Windows updates. I have not used Windows on my dual-boot laptop for months for precisely that reason... I am waiting anxiously to see that patented as well.

Over at ZDNet, Ed Burnette discusses a blog post by James Gosling, who created Java while at Sun. He relates how Sun lost big on a court decision regarding a trivial IBM patent. Sun employees were soon after encouraged to flood the patent office with applications, and there seems to have been a competition on who gets the silliest patent.

Burnette conjectures that one of those goofy patents is in fact among those that Oracle, who recently acquired Sun, is suing Google over. Does this qualify as irony?

Not to speak of being essential for start-up firms that wanted support from venture capitalists.

Microsoft obtained yesterday patent 7,617,530, a "rights elevator":

Systems and/or methods are described that enable a user to elevate his or her rights. In one embodiment, these systems and/or methods present a user interface identifying an account having a right to permit a task in response to the task being prohibited based on a user's current account not having that right.

People familiar with UNIX or Linux recognize immediately the file rights management that is inherent in the security that these operating systems offer. In particular, the command line instruction sudo does exactly what this patent claims: it allows a user to see a file or run a command for which it has no privileges. The sudo command dates back to around 1980. The file rights management predates this by many years.

Is somebody asleep at the wheel at the US Patent Office?

Ryan Paul writes "Microsoft has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against TomTom alleging that the device maker's products, including some that are Linux-based, infringe on patents related to Microsoft's FAT32 filesystem. This marks the first time that Microsoft has enforced its FAT patents against the Linux platform, a move that some free software advocates have long feared could be disastrous link here."

Such a move has long been expected, and from time to time, MS has made noises about its software patents being infringed but then didn't pursue it. This raises the possibility that MS feels more threatened than in the past by competition from Linux.

The choice of TomTom, a small firm, as the target suggests that MS thinks it is likely to fold and would like to have a precedent. Is it possible that MS also believes software patents may not be solid?

As most of us here believe, software patents are a particularly outrageous creation of the courts among the group of dubious extensions of intellectual property. Some public outrage is needed here.