Microsoft patents 'page up' and 'page down'

Microsoft was granted a patent on the ‘page up' and ‘page down' keystroke just a couple of weeks ago. As noted by ZDNet, US patent number 7,415,666 describes "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." The patent was applied for by Microsoft in 2005, though I seem to remember seeing it on my first IBM-PC almost 15 years ago. Personally, I doubt Microsoft will be able to leverage this patent to milk any royalties. In all likelihood, the company is simply building up a war chest that it can use to mitigate patent litigation by other tech companies.

For more on this story:
- check out this ZDNet article