Monday, February 07, 2005

Patently Insane, Continued

No less than 30 minutes after I had a bit of a go at patents, I found something that really annoys me.

The gist of it? Microsoft claims to have 'invented' a system of inserting imprecise numbers into URLs to represent longitude and latitude by concatinating them.

For the non geekish: Every point on the world has a longitude and latitude. These things are pretty precise... For instance, I live near longitude: 138.5831, latitude: -34.9502. Microsoft says that if I put those numbers in a URI in a certain way, and that URI is about whatever is there, they can sue me.

Summary of Patent: IfYouWriteLikeThisItsPatented... except with long/lat numbers. Joined together words are out of bounds.

To challenge them, it would cost me an arm and a leg. Not this very week was I renewing my interest in a geospatial annotation and mapping thing inspired by OpenGuides...

And now... NOTHING.

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