Microsoft Makes Patent Bid For Emoticons

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

26 July 2005

A patent application filed by Microsoft in the United States relating to the creation of custom emoticons or 'smilies' has caused outrage amongst open source and civil liberties groups.

According to Microsoft's application to the US Patent and Trademark Office, filed in January 2004, the patent covers:

"Methods and devices for creating and transferring custom emoticons (to) allow a user to adopt an arbitrary image as an emoticon, which can then be represented by a character sequence in real-time communication."

"In one implementation, custom emoticons can be included in a message and transmitted to a receiver in the message. In another implementation, character sequences representing the custom emoticons can be transmitted in the message instead of the custom emoticons in order to preserve performance of text messaging."

"At the receiving end, the character sequences are replaced by their corresponding custom emoticons, which can be retrieved locally if they have been previously received, or can be retrieved from the sender in a separate communication from the text message if they have not been previously received."

Speaking to the ZD Net news service following the USPTO's publication last week of the application, executive director of the UK's Open Source Consortium, Mark Taylor warned that:

"Emoticons are a form of language, and a precedent allowing patenting of language constructs is very dangerous indeed."

Speaking to the news service on behalf of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, meanwhile, Jonas Maebe observed that:

"It is unfortunately quite clear such patents have nothing to do with protecting investments nor R&D, and only with obtaining exclusion rights which can help them maintain their dominant position in the market."

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