The Windows 8 interface, formerly known as Metro, relies heavily on the new Live Tiles that can be found on the Start screen. There is nothing quite so obviously revolutionary about Windows 8 as the way these are used. Practically every complaint and much of the praise that Microsoft has gotten over the changes to the computing experience can be tied into the implementation of these tiles. Unfortunately, they might not be Microsoft’s to implement.
Portland-based SurfCast has filed a patent infringement suit over the Live Tile interface used in Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. It appears that they may have patented this kind of thing years before Microsoft sought their own patent.
From the text of the SurfCast patents:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.“…a graphical user interface which organizes content from a variety of information sources into a grid of tiles, each of which can refresh its content independently of the others.”
“Tiles permit ‘dynamic bookmarking’ of information in that each tile is a viewer of a single information source—including streaming data sources—and can be customized with the user’s choice of content as well as initialized with sets of options that are pre-determined by the software of the present invention”
“A tile is different from an icon because it provides a real-time or near real-time view of the underlying information in that it contains continually refreshed content.”
“A tile provides an at-a-glance view of the current status of the program or file associated with it but does not necessarily have the large number of active areas associated with windows such as title bar, menu bar, toolbars, and scroll bars.”
That all sounds very familiar for some reason.
Microsoft has stayed largely silent on this issue so far aside from confirming their intention to continue using the interface and declaring that they came up with the concept on their own.
Given how obvious an idea this seems to be, it’s easy to pass this off as just another “patent troll” looking to cash in on a huge new product. Unlike most such companies, however, SurfCast has been around over a decade and came up with these patents in-house. They didn’t just acquire something applicable in order to bring a lawsuit. There is a good chance that this is not an attempt to abuse the broken system of patent law, despite the ongoing series of similar-sounding lawsuits doing exactly that all over the tech world and especially in the mobile device market.
The biggest problem that SurfCast will have is proving that the Live Tile idea isn’t so obvious that its patents are invalid. If Microsoft is able to successfully argue that the tiles were part of a natural and unprompted progression in their interface design, for example, they can’t be infringing.
SurfCast does claim that Microsoft has been aware of their patents since at least early 2009, which could cause problems for their defense if true. This will obviously not halt the sales of Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 for the moment, but the damages could be substantial if this suit is successful.