AmberBlog

New York based Surfcast are suing Microsoft over the tiles used in the recently released Windows 8 products, and which are also seen in tablets and smartphones incorporating the latest Windows operating system.

The basis of this litigation is the Surfcast owned patent US6724403, which has a priority date of October 1999, and discloses:

a graphical user interface which organizes content from a variety of information sources into a grid of tiles, each of which can refresh its content independently of the others

But were Surfcast the first to patent this concept?

To help answer this question, we entered patent number US 6724403 into our patent search engine AmberScope, currently available in a free beta trial, and which employs the concept of Network Patent Searching to help find patents. This revealed a complex patent landscape, which may not that surprising given the current level of interest in user interfaces. In the picture below, the red circled dot shows the position of US 6724403, and the dots show all of the patents connected by backward or forward citations to this patent, along with a selected number of the indirectly connected patents

There are a number of ways we can analyse such a landscape. In this particular case, we chose to focus on the patents that were filed prior to the year 2001, and ranked all of the patents for their potential relevance to the Surfcast patent. AmberScope includes the ability to capture our rankings via a change in patent colour - in the diagram below red patents are ranked by us as having a relevancy score of 4 (out of a possible 4), orange patents have a relevancy score of 3, purple patents have a relevancy score of 2, and yellow patents have been read but not marked as relevant, 

It should be noted that none of these highly rated patents appeared to give a direct disclosure of the Surfcast patent. This is not surprising - if they did, being a known listed backward citation for the Surfcast patent, the Surfcast patent may not have been granted.

However the value of these patents is that they can guide us to other patents that may have been missed by the patent examiner for the Surfcast patent. In this case, one of the highly ranked prior art patents was US5479602 to Apple. This discloses: 

a method and means for generating and displaying a content-based depiction of a standard icon on the display of a computer

Which does differ from the Surfcast patent, but is a little bit similar.

Where it gets more interesting though, is what happen when the patent network is refocused on this Apple patent. This patent does not have that many connected patents, and one of them, a forward citation is US6988248 to Sun Microsystems (now owned by Oracle), and which has a priority date of June 1997.

US6988248 discloses the concept of a software 'container', where:

An animated indicator displays a graphical animation on the computer screen that represents a software container.....

 ...potentially including information such as amount, type, and activity of the container. As the state of the container changes, the animation routine may change accordingly. In this manner, users are presented with up-to-date and detailed information about a container represented by a small graphic pictorial. Thus, the user receives a continuous supply of useful information about the container without having to specifically select and view the container as a full screen representation.

The particular animation sequence is keyed to the software container represented, and may change as parameters of the software container change.

Which does appear to disclose some of the key elements of the Surfcast patent - suggesting that it could possibly be used to help invalidate the Surfcast patent.

This is a great example of the limitations of conventional patent searching based on keywords. Different patent applicants and attorneys can use different technical words for similar concepts. In this case, Sun used the term 'container' for a concept referred to by Surfcast as a 'tile'. But a rose is a rose by any other name, and this case, a 'container' has a similar apparent meaning to a 'tile'. Just to further confuse things, Apple in turn used the word 'icon' for the same concept.

How many patent searchers reading this would have used 'container' as a synonym for 'tile'? Or for 'icon'?

The example also highlights the inconsistent use of patent codes in this patent document. Consider the table below, which summarise these differences: 

So in summary, a search for earliers patents similar to Surfcast's US patent 6724403 using AmberScope has identified a Sun patent US6988248 that discloses a similar concept, that is connected to the Surfcast patent via an Apple patent. 

The search strategy for this search is shown below.

This case study is a great example of the additional value that AmberScope adds to your patent searching in additional to conventional techniques - and the dangers of relying on keyword or IPC searching alone.

Image via Gizmodo

Now I am sure Microsoft make a lot of prototypes that never make it to market, but the story of the Courier and its demise piqued my interest (The inside story of how Microsoft killed its Courier tablet).

Not only was J Allard's concept interesting, promising the the best of both tablet and stylus computing, it was also a few months before the iPad was launched, giving rise to a whole range of 'what if questions' Microsoft had gone head to head with the iPad day one questions.

Of course there is no guarantee the Courier would have lived up to its promise, bearing in mind that J Allard (the self proclaimed “Eminem of Microsoft”) was also the man who gave us the brown Zune, and after stating that they has “spun, goosed and tweaked the new xbox 360” failed to mention it also hadn't been tested properly, eventually having to extend the warranty by three years to cover the alarming rate at which the hardware failed (estimated to cost over us$1B).

I still find the idea of a dual screen, booklike Courier compelling, the Nintendo DS proves concept works in the market place and the built in cover provided by the second screen seems like a very natural form factor for a tablet to me (based on how many people have added a flip cover to their iPads). Add the combination of both quick touch input and precise smudge free stylus, and I think you could be on a winner, with a meaningful point of differentiation. Something that recent patent spats suggest is missing from the current marketplace.

So in the coming months, as I am bombarded with marketing for the Tablet friendly 'Windows 8', I will spare a thought for the Courier who tried to do things differently, rather than the more nebulous better.

(sorry, I could not resist adding this J.Allard photo before (left) and after (right) the stylists were let lose on him, thanks to Kotaku for the image)