Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18336 .
From the above article "THOSE watching Vole's more recent moves with the US
Patent office have started to pull files to see if the software giant has any more rabbits up its sleeve.
Much to the shock of Firefox and Mozarella users everywhere, it seems that Vole owns the patent for tab based browsing.
In March 1997 the software giant showed up at the patent office with the invention of Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs (although tab browsing is available since 1995). In other words, when a computer user uses the Tab key to move the focus from one hyperlink to another on a webpage opened in a browser, the use of that function is now owned by Microsoft.
We are interested at how Vole managed to pull this one on the Patent Office as Delphi was using tabs in the mid 1990s, so did Lotus Organiser.
But the nice people behind the counter smiled and said on August 31 certainly Mr Gates take patent number 6,785,865. On the same day they were also given another patent number 6,784,354 for "Generating a music snippet".
This means that technically if you slice up a music stream into bits you have to send some form of acknowledgment to Microsoft for coming up with the idea.
Most of us are sitting with our fingers in our ears waiting for the massive number of writs that might emerge if Vole ever decides to enforce some of the patents which officialdom has seen fit to grant it."
Can this be verified? What will this mean for Mozilla or other OpenSource browsers?
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