Can someone explain to me how this is a patent?

Can Someone Explain to Me How This Is a Patent?

November 28th, 2005 · 6 Comments · GIS

“A novel display control and information management system seamlessly integrates layered and slotted formatted data from both local and remote sources to provide a highly versatile information display. The system permits selective control of display so that complex data and data flows can be seamlessly accessed with enhanced cognition of salient information by the User.”

We’ve all been doing this for years with GIS, so how can this company get a patent on this stuff? I never considered the work I’ve done in web based GIS “novel”, but maybe that is why I never thought to get a patent on it. I suspect we’ll start seeing the patent wars enter the GIS world over the next year as companies begin to discover the power of GIS. Maybe ESRI should have been getting some patents over the years to protect themselves. Is anyone else a little worried about patents being issued for prior work in GIS?

Where do I send the royalty payments to StrataVarious for my applications?

[tags]gis, patent, stratavarious, mapping[/tags]

Tags: Programming

6 responses so far ↓

1 Justin // Nov 28, 2005 at 11:18 am

Apparently, they did something to the seams.
2 James Fee // Nov 28, 2005 at 11:19 am

Yea, but how is that patentable? Sure I’ve come up with some “novel” code in my time, but that doesn’t mean it should/can be patentable.
3 Brian Flood // Nov 28, 2005 at 1:20 pm

The patent system is a mess. There are so many overlapping claims that it comes down to enforcement tactics, with the deepest pockets usually winning by a war of attrition. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.

I remember seeing a patent that was given out 2-3 years ago pertaining to online GIS. If you looked at the description and the appendices, it pretty much described how nearly every single online mapping application works (both prior to it and now). I could not believe someone actually got a patent for that broad a subject matter.
4 James Fee // Nov 28, 2005 at 1:23 pm

The other thought is something I read over on another blog (maybe Scoble, can’t remember) about “marketing patents”. Companies get patents that they know they can’t defend, but use them in marketing materials so it seems like their word is revolutionary.
5 Andrew Hallam // Nov 29, 2005 at 1:59 am

Brian, you might be thinking of MultiMap’s patent covering “Method and apparatus for providing location-based information via a computer network”. They display the patent number on the bottom of their home page.
6 Brian Flood // Nov 29, 2005 at 7:58 am

Andrew - that’s just perfect, so I guess everyone doing anything in the location-based arena is in violation of their patent? what a joke.

I went back and the one I was thinking of was from ObjectFX. Their “patent” describes how nearly all mapservers work internally.

Here’s the actual patent listing