Cingular Patents The Emoticon

Source: RealTechNews
To be honest, I’ve never been a huge fan of the emoticon. When harmless they are cute, when used at the end of a rude comment like “just kidding!” they seem hostile. But for the most part, they are a part of Internet culture ever since email began zinging around. Today, if you can believe it, I found out that Cingular is going to patent the emoticon. As far-fetched as that sound, in this era of Amazon owning “the one-click” and RIM battling for the ability to send Blackberry email, patent law is scary and not even close to overheating. The patent number is US2006015812 if you want to look it up.
We say: Why stop there? Why not patent BTW and ROTFL and RTFM?

The USA based mobile operator, Cingular Wireless has managed to get a patent on the concept of using emoticon on mobile phones. While the aim of the patent is to enable the displaying of MSN style graphics on handsets, they also managed to patent the delivery of text based emoticon - so presumably sending via an SMS - if selected via a dedicated or softkey, would be a breach of the patent in future.


Source: CellularNews