Google wants to patent a technology called “Server-Based Data Sharing in Computer Applications,” which describes “techniques by which data may be shared using a clipboard paradigm in hosted computing applications” that can be invoked with “keyboard combinations (e.g., CTRL-C, CTRL-X, and CTRL-V).”
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published the filing this week. Google submitted the patent application in 2010, the same year it announced the general availability of its web-based clipboard, commonly known as a ‘Cloudboard‘, for copying and pasting data between Google Docs.
The concept will sound very familiar to anyone who remembers then-Microsoft executive Ray Ozzie publicly demonstrating “Live Clipboard,” his take on a web clipboard, at the ETech 2006 Conference — four years before Google’s patent filing.
Calling the technology “a little gift to the Web,” Ozzie released the work under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Live Clipboard never really took off, at least not in that original form.
Here’s a diagram from the Google patent filing, with the description from the application.
FIG. 1 is a conceptual diagram of a hosted system 100 that provides hosted clipboard functionality. The system 100 is shown here as involving two word processing documents 102, 104 that have shared a common piece of content in the form of an image 108, through the internet 106, and using a hosted server system 110. The content in this example was shared by a user, who was operating with document 102, by selecting the image 108 and then selecting on-screen controls to copy the image 108 to a system clipboard. The content was then accessed from the clipboard on the hosted system, such as by a user operating with document 104, by the user selecting a clipboard command from an on-screen menu, and then selecting the particular image 108 from a list of multiple pieces of content that were displayed to the user.