Stefan Mileschin

More HP sauce

The maker over over-priced printer ink, HP has just decided that it invented reminder messages and has scored itself a patent from the daft US Patent Office.

The silly patent was spotted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. United States Patent No. 9,715,680 (the '680 patent) is titled "Reminder messages." While the patent application does suggest some minor tweaks to standard automated reminders, none of these supposed additions deserve patent protection.

Although this claim uses some obscure language (like "non-transitory computer-readable storage medium" and "article data"), it describes a quite mundane process.

The "article data" is simply additional information associated with an event. For example, "buy a cake" might be included with a birthday reminder. The patent also requires that this extra information be input via a "scanning operation" (e.g. scanning a QR code).

http://fudzilla.com/news/44202-hp-pa...inder-messages