So what troubled the USPTO enough to trigger a rare Director-ordered
reexam of SBC's Framed Browsing patents? Was it the prior art pointed
out by columnists Robert X. Cringely [1] and Dan Gillmor [2]? Nope.
According to USPTO documents, the decision was based solely upon one
figure [3] from an obscure 1992 IEEE article [4] on Seesoft ("A Tool
for Visualizing Line Oriented Software Statistics"). Is it good enough
to overturn the patents? Would a page from a 1994 IBM BookManager
Manual [5] have been more on-point?
[1]
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030130.html
[2]
http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/colu...s/000762.shtml
[3]
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~aspoer...pages/fig5.htm
[4]
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?i...CM&coll=portal
[5]
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bi...00H#FIGEJ2F00H 
