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IBM patents out-of-office messages

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From the «dot plan files still up for grabs though» department:
Title: IBM Gets a Patent On 'Out-of-Office' Email Messages -- In 2017
Author: help@slashdot.org
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2017 18:45:00 -0500
Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/AyMOU1_G6FQ/ibm-gets-a-patent-on-out-of-office-email-messages----in-2017

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued IBM a -- what the Electronic
Frontier Foundation calls -- "stupefyingly mundane" patent on e-mail
technology. U.S. Patent No. 9,547,842, "Out-of-office electronic mail messaging
system" was filed in 2010 and granted about six weeks ago. Ars Technica
reports: The "invention" represented in the '842 patent is starkly at odds with
the real history of technology, accessible in this case via a basic Google
search. EFF lawyer Daniel Nazer, who wrote about the '842 patent in this
month's "Stupid Patent of the Month" blog post, points to an article on a
Microsoft publicity page that talks about quirky out-of-office e-mail culture
dating back to the 1980s, when Microsoft marketed its Xenix e-mail system (the
predecessor to today's Exchange.) IBM offers one feature that's even arguably
not decades old: the ability to notify those writing to the out-of-office user
some days before the set vacation dates begin. This feature, similar to
"sending a postcard, not from a vacation, but to let someone know you will go
on a vacation," is a "trivial change to existing systems," Nazer points out.
Nazer goes on to identify some major mistakes made during the examination
process. The examiner never considered whether the software claims were
eligible after the Supreme Court's Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which came in
2014, and in Nazer's view, the office "did an abysmal job" of looking at the
prior art. "[T]he examiner considered only patents and patent applications,"
notes Nazer. The office "never considered any of the many, many, existing
real-world systems that pre-dated IBM's application."

[image 2][2][image 4][4][image 6][6]

Read more of this story[7] at Slashdot.
[image 8]

Links:
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[7]: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/03/01/2130215/ibm-gets-a-patent-on-out-of-office-email-messages----in-2017?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed (link)
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IBM patents out-of-office messages RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2017-03-02 03:08 +0000

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