Google, Apple, Microsoft sued

... if there ever was one. I think there should be a rule for software patents that prohibits patenting ideas that an idiot child of 5 can come up with. Hope thi sputs some needed vigor in the anti-patent movement.

It's just a matter of time before we get individually sued for breathing (systematically using chest muscles to inhale and exhale air).

Their money would be better spent, for the good of humanity, to hire some mercenaries to "deal with" these patent trolls and send a nice message to them.

The Patent was issued in 2001 and it is now 2008 (soon to be 2009). You must protect your Patent by going after those who who violate it soon after the violation. These Turkeys did not do so and thus have lost the right to sue (or enforce it).

if only we would demonstrate a proportionate amount of disdain when a fascist corporate entity uses the law as its personal henchman to further its gain... ::cough:: mikerosoft ::cough:: riaa ::hack:: mpaa ::cough::

that MS, Apple, and Google will show prior art by firing up a copy of Word 98 and/or claim that the feature is not novel by demonstrating hundreds of other programs that have done this over the past decade. Stupid lawsuits like this is why the above three patent ridiculously stupid things like about menus and file icons. Someone is bound to try to get some wild hair and find something to sue them over.

Granted, if they can settle for less than what it could cause them in legal fees, they may do that and then spend time and money patenting every little feature of their operating systems/software that they may have missed.

Throw skin and blister from the pram and spit out dummy! Hissy! Hissy! Tater-N-Chum! Gonna bosh ’n gonna nosh ’n da Troll’ll disappear. Fee Fie Foe Fum. I blame open sauce. hack cough.

At the very least, Windows ME had this feature. That predates that patent by a year. I'm sure plenty of other cases of prior art exist.

Actually, file preview was natively available under Windows 95A by changing a value hidden in the registry, and third-party apps offered the feature atleast as early as Windows 3.xx. However, the average x86 computer was so slow and had so little RAM back then that enabling the feature would make the PC crawl and in some cases crash. Anyone that lived through the early history of home computers will recognize that the patent claimed by Cygnus is very obvious and not novel. Additionally, non-x86 platforms offered file previous in the middle through late 1980s. Does anyone remember the Amiga, Atari ST, early Macs, GEM based systems, etc... I have not mentioned the work done by the poineers of Xerox PARC which is were the GUI and icon formats were originally created even earlier. Our societies have a short term memory problem. Some young people think they are the first ones to ever have a particular idea. We all need to get a clue. To everyone out there, read a real book. Contrary to popular belief everything is not available on the INTERNET, and yes it is supposed be all caps as INTERNET is an acronym.

I'm sure that this patent application would make for an interesting (yet vaguely worded) reading.

"...on the INTERNET, and yes it is supposed be all caps as INTERNET is an acronym."

Contrary to your mistaken belief, Daniel R., it is not an acronym, nor is it spelled all caps (it can be capitalised or uncapitalised, ie. Internet or internet, but never INTERNET). Look up the meaning of acronym and tell me how it relates to the word "internet" which is shorthand for "internetworking".

As for the patent troll it's just another way for lawyers to get fat... they must know this case doesn't stand a snowballs chance in hell, but they'll still take it on.

@Daniel R.

Internet is not an acronym. It is at worst an abbreviation. Spelled out in full it is Inter Network Connection.

Computers were first linked to each other in small groups. When the map of the links was drawn it looked like a fishnet. So the combination was a Net-Work. When a protocol was designed to allow Net-Works to be treated as nodes in a larger group the connections were called Inter-Net-Work.

Many more protocols were used to actually allow networks to trade data over the connections, one of which is called World Wide Web...that protocol is what most now see as "The Internet".

WWW is an acronym
Internet is just a word.

When you wish to shout you can spell it all caps though :P

The abacus had previews...

Now anti-patent Movement sounds interesting...

OS X 10.0 was released to the public on march 24th of the same year. As it takes more than 6 days to code, debug, press, package, and distribute an OS, wouldn't this constitute prior art. This is after all the first instance of the 'Dock' in the Mac operating system, as well as the snapshot icons which represent applications and files. Although this wouldn't cover such features as quicklook and coverflow, if these features are considered to fall under the same patent, wouldn't the patent itself be rather irrelevant.