Last week I read a bunch of news stories that led with a provocative headline: Microsoft has been awarded a patent for the double-click. Horrors! Those bastards!
The only problem is the story wasn’t true.
I’m reminded of the myth that Al Gore once claimed to have invented the Internet, which was spread by his political opponents with ruthless efficiency (he never claimed any such thing). This is, likewise, a distortion of a fairly innocuous story, spread along by the large anti-Microsoft community.
Today’s Seattle P-I explains where the story went wrong:
Microsoft Corp. caused a stir in the technology world last week with news that it was awarded a patent for, among other things, starting a program “if the application button is pressed multiple times within a short period of time, e.g., double click.”
Could it be? Could the Redmond company now make other companies pay for the ubiquitous practice of tapping a computer mouse twice to open a program on a computer screen? …
[A] closer read of the patent text indicated it wasn’t as broad — or as sinister — as the initial headlines suggested. The patent relates to different ways of tapping or holding down a hardware button to launch programs and other functions on “a limited resource computing device.”
That refers to a button on a hand-held device such as a Pocket PC, not to the double-clicking of a mouse on a PC, a Microsoft spokesman said.
In fact, if you read the patent, it clearly is referring to “Small, mobile computing devices, such as personal desktop assistants including hand-held and palm-type computers…” (Or, I might add, intelligent all-in-one remote controls for complex home media networks, and portable music players.) If you’ve ever tried to use any sort of smart handheld device, you know how difficult it can be to learn, especially when many functions have to be squeezed into a tiny interface with a limited number of buttons.
Scoble points to a note by Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research, who points out, there’s no “double-click” patent for Microsoft:
This is just plain wrong. Read the patent. It covers alternate uses of buttons on mobile devices based on how long a button is pressed and how many times it’s pushed (similar to a double click, which is where the confusion comes from). Usually there’s a modifier key that needs to be held down to activate the alternate function. The power of the web is such is that amplifies such bad reporting quite quickly.
There are plenty of problems with the patent system and especially with the concept of awarding patents for software. If you have specific objections to this patent, by all means argue against it. A lot of people don’t like the way big corporations (including Microsoft) control intellectual property. Great subject for a debate. But the story that Microsoft has somehow claimed a patent on double-clicking your mouse is just wrong, and it doesn’t deserve to spread.
Ed Bott 