IBM cons patent office about email feature then backs down
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Sounds good to me.
If you’ve ever set your email account to send out an I’m on vacation and you’re not auto-response, you might have just dodged a bullet. The U.S. patent office granted IBM a patent on an “out-of-office electronic mail messaging system” that is indistinguishable from the vacation auto-responder that’s been baked into every email platform on the planet for the past 20 years.
But in a gesture of corporate magnanimity – after being roundly and justifiably ripped by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the trade press – IBM has released the patent into the public domain.… More