#ExcelPedroWave

It all started less than 20 years ago with the emergence of the first web browser and its spectacular growth over the last two decades, it has become ubiquitous in our lives, leisure, work and in our fixed and mobile communications used to buy goods even remotely, which is known as e-commerce online.

In the previous article I commented the Letters Patent of Marque and Reprisal received by entrepreneurs of the New World to become the masters of wealth sailing the seas and robbing foreigners, without being considered pirates by their governments.

A special case is the Software Patents that have always generated controversy over what is patentable or not, the thousands of algorithms, procedures and components of a computer application to develop, serving as currency among the major corporations that exchange software patent stock, leaving in the lurch to small and medium enterprises. It is as if the largest ship chartering prevented others small companies to sail in the seas or the web to take over world trade.

It is known the famous case of the shopping cart which is patented by Amazon.com as one-click buying with a single mouse click lets you include a product in the cart then give the buy order.

Now Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, has sued 11 companies because he says the business can exploit the Internet through its patented inventions for e-commerce and content searches on the Internet. His company Interval Research was one of four founders of the Google search engine, now also sued by Oracle for use without permission of the patents protecting its Java programming language.

One of the 4 patents that have been violated, according to Allen, relates to Graphical User Interface - GUI that lets us surf for audiovisual information.

Patent number: US 6880171 B1

Filing Date: June 25, 1999
Issue Date: April 12, 2005

Title: Browser for use in navigating a body of information, with particular application to browsing information represented by audiovisual data

The documentation in this patent can be found at:

FIG. 2A is a diagrammatic representation of a graphical user interface (GUI) 200 according to the invention that can be used to enable control of the operation of a system according to the invention, display information regarding operation of thesystem of the invention and display information acquired by the system of the invention.

FIG. 2B is a view of an illustrative GUI 210 in accordance with the diagrammatic representation of FIG. 2A. The GUI 210 is particularly tailored for use with an embodiment of the invention in which the primary information includes videotape ofone or more news programs and the secondary information includes the text of news stories from text news sources.

Traducción al español aquí.