Microsoft's "Immortal Computing" Project

SeenOnSlash writes "Microsoft is working on a project they call 'immortal computing' which would let people store digital information in durable physical artifacts and other forms to be preserved and revealed to future generations, and maybe even to future civilizations. The artifacts would be designed to make the process of accessing the information clear with instructions in multiple languages or hieroglyphics. In one possible use, messages for descendants or interactive holograms might be stored on tombstones. The project was revealed when their patent application recently became public."

A bit rich

[turing_m]

This is from the company whose business model is built around proprietary document formats - the sole purpose of which is to lock users into a never-ending upgrade cycle.

Yuh huh...

[Greyfox]

They can't even manage to preserve "digital artifacts" between two different versions of Word, much less forever. If you want to preserve a document forever post it in plain text on the Internet and hope that other people find value in it. You can still find 20-year old documents from the BBS era on the Internet because people found value in them and kept reposting them. And none of those documents are in a proprietary document format!

The key to durability...

[killbill!]

... is not to make the material support last forever, but to make as many copies as possible, and replace them often.

If the goal is to keep valuable information for future generations, a regularly upgraded, Internet-based distributed storage system would be a better bet.

Can Sci-Fi be considered prior art?

[erroneus]

I have seen more than enough science fiction to have seen this application in many forms. How can this initiative be patentable?!

Nice idea, but it doesn't deserve a patent

[TheJasper]

I can't believe they are trying to patent this (well, I can, but I don't want to). Anyone heard of Frederick Pohl? Author of the Gateway books. The aliens (and later humans) archived themselves for posterity. There are plenty of other examples as well.

It's a good idea, but not original. I read the article, but couldn't force myself through the whole patent. Still, it sounds to me like they are trying to patent the idea of a time capsule, with the only difference being that they are talking about information in a more interactive form.

They aren't even trying to patent a specific technique, but the whole idea. From the patent application (all the way at the bottom which I did read):

What has been described above includes examples of the subject matter. It is, of course, not possible to describe every conceivable combination of components or methodologies for purposes of describing the subject matter, but one of ordinary skill in the art may recognize that many further combinations and permutations of the subject matter are possible. Accordingly, the subject matter is intended to embrace all such alterations, modifications and variations that fall within the spirit and scope of the appended claims. Furthermore, to the extent that the term "includes" is used in either the detailed description or the claims, such term is intended to be inclusive in a manner similar to the term "comprising" as "comprising" is interpreted when employed as a transitional word in a claim.

So basically they are claiming that any system which in any way is similar to theirs is covered. Ok, par for the course. It still isn't very original, and doesn't deserve a patent.

What do they want to achieve anyway? Will you have to buy a renewable licensing scheme for accessing this information? Will it contain drm? Will sony end up owning your grandfathers immortal thoughts?

So what if I write an interactive information system as described, with the one difference is that I'm still alive, and I just want my genius available to my friends and family without actually having to talk to them. Does the system all of a sudden owe licensing costs to MS when I die?

This has to be one of silliest patent ideas I've seen. Of course, I haven't seen all that many and remain convinced that there are many more that are sillier.

Re:What do you wish YOUR ancestors recorded for yo

[CmdrGravy]

Good question and I think it depends on the number of generations they are removed from me, the information I'd like my parents to store is much different to the information I'd like a Great Great Great Great Granparent to store for me. This is assuming there is a limit to the amount of data they can preserve into the future.

With the more ancient relatives I'd be more interested in the day to day trivia of their lives since their lives would quite likely be very different from the life I'm used to but the more recent relatives I'd like to know more about their relationships between other branches of my family. For everyone I'd like some insight into any large decisions they have made, e.g. going to war or whatever.

I often wander to what extent my perception of the past is influenced by black and white photographs or grainy footage, it's strange that when I see some of the very rare pioneering colour film from the Edwardian period it seems a lot easier to relate to as the past being a real place than it does in black and white and I wonder what effect this will have on our ancestors as they view our lives today in full colour.

Re:Nice idea, but it doesn't deserve a patent

[ozmanjusri]

This has to be one of silliest patent ideas I've seen.

It's even funnier when you realise they're trying to protect their "immortal computing" insights with a patent that expires after 20 years.

If they produce a product, I bet the EULA will guarantee they'll support it for 20 years, or eternity, whichever comes first...

Sounds like a job for ODF

[giafly]

OpenDocument or ODF [wikipedia.org] "became an officially published ISO and IEC International Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) on November 30, 2006 ... The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats so organizations and individuals can avoid being locked in to [and outlive] a single vendor."

If there's anything that should completely die out

[toby]

...It's anything relating to Microsoft.

Erasing them and everything they touch from the face of the earth is one of the most helpful things we can do for future civilisation.

Re:Altruism

[Anonymous Coward]

patents are not always driven by greed (not saying this is not the MS motivation here). Patent laws the way they are mean you MUST patent what you create. If they don't patent what they create you can bet every penny in Microsoft's bank account that as soon as they do create it and they haven't patented it, that someone else will patent it and with patent laws the way they are something that "could" be purely non profit motivated could cost them a fortune. patents are defensive as well as offensive.

Karma Whore link!

[erroneus]

http://free.patentfetcher.com/Patent-Fetcher.php?s ubmit=Fetch&PN=20070011109 [patentfetcher.com]

Go to the link above and it will get the patent docs into a PDF format so that you don't have to install that ridiculous TIFF plugin. And if someone out there knows an easier way to view the page without a ridiculous plugin (under Linux+Firefox) please tell?

Re:Yuh huh...

[kestasjk]

The great thing about digital information is that it doesn't need to be stored on immortal storage; if people care about the data it can be copied again and again to and from storages which die while the data lives on.

This has the nice bonus that usually no-one cares about information that's boring, so as time goes on the good stuff lingers while the blogs die; it's very similar to natural selection, right down to the immortal digital information being stored in temporary bodies.

Re:Yuh huh...

[dangitman]

This has the nice bonus that usually no-one cares about information that's boring, so as time goes on the good stuff lingers

Popular != good.

More importantly, what we find interesting today, might be totally worthless to people in the future, while stuff we consider useless and boring could be immensely valuable. That's the big problem with backups - you never really know today what you might want tomorrow. In many ways, the reverse is true - what is not backed up will gain value because of its rarity. Imagine how much you could make if you found a lost Shakespeare sonnet today - discarded by Shakespeare because he thought it was utter crap.

Ozymandias of Egypt

[hachete]

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said:--Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

What artifacts would store the info?

[pjbass]

The patent surrounds the method of storing data on an device to persist indefinately. I want to know any hardware vendor today that makes some form of silicon or any other storage medium that lasts indefinately, or one that has announced plans to make such a device. Microsoft has some really interesting things coming out of their research labs, but this one makes me scratch my head, since they are not a hardware company, and no hardware company has anything remotely close to handling this research. While it's very interesting to be thinking of these things, I don't see why this is a big deal as compared to any other research project any other technology company may be working on.

Honestly, this is making headlines because whenever Microsoft files for obscure patents that their rather talented architects and strategic planners can forsee, they are challenged on the basis of validity for their patent. If some startup somewhere was doing this research, it would have never made /. Compare this to all research being done in quantum computing arenas, where some rather radical advances and theories are being pursued, way more radical than this. Do you read about them here? Not usually.

Then again, the ol' rock, chisel, and hammer seemed to hold information for a damn long time...

Mod parent up!

[dido]

Very, very clever. If I had mod points I'd give them! If Microsoft is really serious about doing this, then they will be doing the very antithesis of what they have been doing since, well, ever. Proprietary file formats anyone? Secret protocols? DRM? All of these things which they've been doing and promoting from the very beginning are precisely the sorts of things that will frustrate future digital archaeologists to no end. Consider the simple fact that we can still read Galileo's technical writings from the 1560's, but not Marvin Minsky's technical writings from the 1960's, thanks to proprietary storage hardware. Stuff is basically written on the wind [longnow.org] these days, and Microsoft has done more than any single organization (largely because of their market monopoly) to make information as evanescent as it is now.

What will we record for future generations??

[tezza]

* Paris Hilton Video
* George Bush dropping the First Dog
* Wikipedia: The Greatest Edits
* Donald Trump's Hairpiece
* Star Wars where Han shoots first

Re:A bit rich

[LaughingCoder]

This is from the company whose business model is built around proprietary document formats - the sole purpose of which is to lock users into a never-ending upgrade cycle.

I look at it a little differently. Microsoft is a company that has consistently put an extremely high priority on backwards compatibility, thereby allowing people to access their data and run their application even though they were produced decades ago. I think MS may be uniquely qualified to tackle a problem like this because of that experience. Contrary to what you assert, people *are not* forced to upgrade *because* MS provides backwards compatibility. I can send an old Word 6.0 document to someone with Word 2007 and they can read it. I am not forced to upgrade unless I want the new features of Word 2007, or unless I want to read Word 2007 files. Further, I can request the sender to write out a Word 6.0 file so that I could read it with my ancient application. Where exactly is the forced upgrade? In fact, many on these boards have commented that Microsoft's big problem is convincing people to upgrade - why buy the new office when the old one works just fine. This would be a much easier task for MS if they took the easy road and abandoned backwards compatibility.

Data != Computing

[Dan East]

I think "Immortal Computing" is a misnomer. Maybe "Immortal Data Storage" would suffice, but when I think of computing I think of software - something that executes. Their term would better suite software designed to be highly portable, that survives independently of hardware (java?).

Dan East

Re:I can see it now...

[digitalgoddess]

Archaeologist: *presses button*
grave: "Use the force, Luke"
Archaeologist: "How unoriginal..."

Re:A bit rich

[BalanceOfJudgement]

Using formats easily understood by unknown technology is a non trivial task, and will require a vast amount of work. While microsoft may start the effort, its doubtful the will complete it without assistance from other companies, if only because those companies may employ someone with important insight into the problem.

I am very much bothered by the fact that you seem to think this must be undertaken by companies. Humans have engaged in the process of legacy-leaving for tens of thousands of years and while it may take time, we still figure out how to read alot of the messages they've left us.

I seriously do not comprehend how putting this sort of endeavor in the hands of a business is in any way culturally beneficial. What's next, patenting the very idea of civilization?