Another absurd Microsoft software patent

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2004 02:43:15 -0400
From: TheoDP@aol.com
To: DGillmor@mercurynews.com, send-us-news-tips@cnet.com,
        jpaczkowski@realcities.com, dave@userland.com, lessig@pobox.com,
        rms@stallman.org
Subject: Microsoft Patents Saving The Name Of A Game
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--> From http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20040406/1349225.shtml

Microsoft Patents Saving The Name Of A Game
Contributed by Mike on Tuesday, April 6th, 2004 @ 01:49PM
from the yeah,-that's-non-obvious dept.

theodp writes "As if there weren't enough dodgy patents, here's an excerpt 
from one granted to Microsoft Tuesday for a Method and apparatus for 
displaying information regarding stored data in a gaming system: 'When saving 
a game, the saved game data may include a descriptive name of the saved game, 
a graphic representation of the state of the game when the game was saved, a 
description of the game state when the game was saved, and a date and time 
that the game was saved.'" I'm trying to figure out if there's more to this 
patent, but the more I read, the worse it seems. How is this possibly 
"non-obvious"?

--> Link to Patent

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6,716,102

--> Link to Patent File History (Shows Two Earlier Rejections)

http://pair.uspto.gov/cgi-bin/final/pairsearch.pl?searchtype=patent&patentnumber=6,716,102