[plug] No Joke - MS tries to patent the conversion of characters to emoticons

[Leon Brooks]

On Tuesday 26 July 2005 22:28, Richard Meyer wrote:
>> The patent application, which was published by the US Patent Office
>> on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image,
>> assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing
>> the emoticon after transmission.

There is not so much "prior art" as "a prior montage". This has the 
chances of a butterfly in a blast furnace of being enforceable, but it 
does chip away at Microsoft's credibility.

Cheers; Leon

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