High Emotions over Microsoft's Smiley Patent

A software patent filed by Microsoft in the US has been described as 'very dangerous'. The Microsoft patent that organisations are concerned about is patent number 0050156873, which was filed in January 2004. The US Patent Office has not yet made a decision on whether to accept the patent application. Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium, said:

"I would have expected to see something like this suggested by one of our more immature community members as a joke on Slashdot, and probably would have chuckled at the absurdity of the notion. We now appear to be living in a world where even the most laughable paranoid fantasies about commercially controlling simple social concepts are being outdone in the real world by well-funded armies of lawyers on behalf of some of the most powerful companies on the planet"