You May Not Patent Something You Did Not Invent
Microsoft claims that the ribbon, appearing in Microsoft Office 2007, is a user interface element (also sometimes called a widget, control or component) so radical, new and revolutionary that it can be considered their exclusive intellectual property and that they should own the patent and license it to whomever they see fit. By now nobody should be surprised that Microsoft is claiming ownership for another product, idea or concept that they did not create. Microsoft did not invent anything here, they merely combined a couple of twenty-five-year-old controls and branded it with a catchy name. In protest of Microsoft’s ownership claim I will not use the term ribbon. I will call it what it is, a tabbed toolbar. The Ribbon is not new intellectual property and Microsoft has no right to claim ownership of the concept nor issue licenses to use it. I only hope that the patent office agrees with me.
What is the Ribbon?
If you haven’t seen it yet, the Ribbon appears in Office 2007 and replaces a number of menus, toolbars and palettes. What I like about the Ribbon is that it certainly allows the developer to create an “essential” feature set and put it right in front of the user. It’s a good way to group logical elements together. However, at the end of the day, the Ribbon is just a toolbar with palettes and tabs, a simple mashup of old user interface elements. Microsoft no more owns this concept of a tabbed toolbar than they own the concept of combining a Toggle Button and a Combo Box (shown to the right).
What is Patentable?
Intellectual property faces four tests for patentability and for Microsoft to have any legal ground to stand on, the Ribbon must pass these four tests: novelty (is it new?), inventiveness (is it non-obvious?), utility (does it actually work?) and industrially applicability (is is used for industry?). The Ribbon fails two of these four tests. Microsoft should be denied a patent.
It’s Not New
in U.S. Patent Law Section 102 an invention is not patentable if another entity had already created the invention and did not abandon, suppress or conceal it. User Interface elements that look and function strikingly like the Microsoft Office Ribbon appear in numerous other software products dating back years (some examples, accorging to Wikipedia, are O&O Defrag 10, ConeXware PowerArchiver 2007 and SysTweak Photo Studio). In fact, an early prototype of the Apple Lisa user interface (March 1980) displayed what appears to be very similar to Microsoft Office 2007’s Ribbon.
It’s Not Inventive
Since the dawn of the modern graphical user interface there have been controls, widgets, components, or whatever you prefer to call them. The first desktop computer with a GUI was the Xerox Alto, created by Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in 1973. Alto features a mouse-driven user interface that showed some familiar user interface elements like the window, icon, menu, button, text box, checkbox, radio button, floating palette and more. Every feature in Microsoft Office 2007’s Ribbon appears in the Alto interface, 34 years earlier.
The bottom line is this. Microsoft did not create a new product. Nor is this product inventive. Microsoft, once again, fails to innovate, but still tries to charge us for it. See the Ribbon for what it is and oppose Microsoft’s licensing.
