Microsoft has just been granted a U.S. patent for "a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed", in other words, the "Page Up" and "Page Down" keystrokes !!! (see here). This is another example of where this crazy software patents system can go.
The problem is that these software giants present the patents they filed as valuable assets (maybe products of extensive research and investments) that could be put at risk by others, say for example evil open source advocates or other competitors. But although I don't doubt that some of their patents deal about real inventions, how to separate these from this over-increasing amount of crap ?
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