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There are a handful of citations about the patents involved in this innovation at the uspto and at ibm.com.

Beeteson has written a book called Visualizing Magnetic Fields. It got some favorable reviews at amazon.com. Hey, wait a minute, those cheery reviews are by his co-patent-holders, Drs Knox and Lowe. Dude. Might be a page turner, you never know.

Here's the link to the IBM patent for the system.("Sleep prevention dialog based car system", US Patent No. 6236968 ).

You're right, this patent is ridiculous. This whole thing is just as ridiculous as British Telecom believing that they own the patent for hyperlinks, and that they can license the techology and thus collect on its use.

Link to patent

Cut and paste link
http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P TO 1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm& r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='4,528,643'.WKU.&OS=PN/4,528,643&R S=PN/4,528,643

The method of combining photos into a mosaic, like every other good idea on the planet, is patented. Try pbmtoascii for textual mosaics.

All the more reason why this prototype system will never be chosen for mass production. Advanced (read "complicated, expensive") technology is almost always chosen over simpler, inexpensive designs in military contracting.

Here's a picture of the device (requires some strange plugin) and Here's the description of the device in question.

Customer Recognition
Customer Worth
more customer recognition

It looks like their system is setup to determine how well a customer should be treated based on past spending at all Harrah's locations. I doubt that collecting data from different locations is all the patents cover.

Customer Recognition
Customer Worth
more customer recognition

It looks like their system is setup to determine how well a customer should be treated based on past spending at all Harrah's locations. I doubt that collecting data from different locations is all the patents cover.

Customer Recognition
Customer Worth
more customer recognition

It looks like their system is setup to determine how well a customer should be treated based on past spending at all Harrah's locations. I doubt that collecting data from different locations is all the patents cover.

APIs can be reproduced, so copyright is essentially useless against reimplementation.

It is true that APIs are not protected against cloning under copyright law; but if they implement a novel and efficient solution to a technical problem, they may indeed have protected it under patent law.

For example, Microsoft has a patent (US 5,297,284) on the layout of the vtables of pointers to functions used in COM objects with multiple inheritance. It is therefore legally forbidden to add a compatibility option in gcc to clone this. (Although according to this post on the gcc list the WINE people do have a workaround).

If you think that MS Legal haven't done their level best to protect .NET against independent third party clones, then you are naive. The recent pre-announcement of the crippleware .NET SDK for BSD explicitly mentions that it includes the licensing of relevant patents, as does MS's development agreement with Corel. Independent implementers are unlikely to be so favoured.

Here's a patent for what basically works out to be a toaster!
(thanks to steve for the link)

Before you get all wet about the prospects of electronic paper you might want to take a glance at all the patents E Ink holds.

"This revolution will be patented."

--

Oh, you mean the secrets anyone is able to acquire from the US patent office?

"Millions" developing? This isn't IBM researching how to improve harddrive data density, this isn't DuPont researching how to create a better weed killer. This is a small company that had an idea (original or not) and patented it. In this case, it took a very small amount of time and effort to create the idea. It could easily have been some guy in the shower thinking about spherical image fields and realizing, "Hey, I bet we can use fisheye images too!".

Maybe people don't understand, or perhaps you haven't really thought enough about it.

A company called CopyTele has been developing a flat panel display technology they call E-Paper for something like the last 15 years and they have filed well over 200 patents for it on the way. It looks very promising, but unfortunately it's not here yet.

It is based on the principle of electrophoresis - moving microscopic particles with electric charge while suspended in opaque fluid. When the particles are moved to the front they are visible, when they are pulled back they are obscured by the fluid.

Since the particles have the same density as the fluid they don't drift. The image stays even after you turn off the power. Power is only required to modify the image, resulting in extremely low power consumption. No backlight is required - the display is reflective and has very high contrast, supposedly comparable to ink on paper. It is clearly visible in full sunlight.

Since the image remains without refreshing it is not necessary to update the image tens of times per second just to get a stable image. This makes it easier to reach very high resolutions (>200DPI). This technology may not be appropriate for video, but it should be ideal for e-books.

If you look at their site you will see that they now sell encryption devices. This move is relatively recent. In their press releases you can see that they are still working on their display technology. I first heard about them in a Popular Science article in 1985(!). I'm still waiting for them to bring this display to market...


-

Few swpat applications contain a working implementation, most do not even give enough information for a skilled programmer to implement what is described.

That may be true for some software patents, but (for example) the United States patent on Nintendo's Dr. Mario game gives a full description of every variable and subroutine. Of course, I stumbled upon this patent after I had worked it out in my head after about two days of non-stop Dr. M play and after I released my clones of Tetris and Puyo Puyo.

The first claim of the patent also seems to cover Tetris 2, Blastris B, and some popular variations on Columns and Klax. Prior art? Not only that, the recent Dr. Mario 64 doesn't mention a patent number on the box, in the manual, or in the credits. (Dr. Mario 64 sucks anyway.)

NINTENDO: THIS IS YOUR INVITATION TO SUE ME UNDER U.S. PATENT 5,265,888. HERE'S THE EVIDENCE!

If you have problems with that just go to http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html and search on American Telephone and Speech Coding for 1988.

This is a link to the text entry in the USPTO's database for the sensor tech used in the PowerGlove. AGE owns that tech and appears to be a licensee of VPL for the idea patent.

Actually, there is no need for Bin Laden to describe how to make TNT.

A potential terrorist could just do a patent search. Check this out.

Also, I believe dynamite was patented.

MM

I just spent a few minutes playing with a demo program that lets you try this layout on a
regular qwerty keyboard (link) The mirror reflection really does make learning much easier. I was quite surprised and its worth giving it a try. $395.00 USD? pffft! He want's an arm and a leg for a keyboard driver.

http://half-qwerty.com/

The web site is amateurish and the program could be duplicated in a few minutes for linux by many of the /. crowd to the benefit of all, particularly those with disabilities. Its too bad we are screwed by his monopoly license.

=============
U.S. Patent No.
5,288,158. European Patent
No. 0,489,792. Australian Patent No. 647,750.

The patent is fairly specific in regards to the actual recording process - in that the input stream is encoded to mpeg-1 - I'm not entirely sure, but I doubt VCRs used mpeg-1

You seem correct about the MPEG requirement; Apple, Microsoft, and Real could circumvent the patent by using their proprietary video encodings. From the patent:

providing at least one Input Section, wherein said Input Section converts said specific program to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation;

This covers not only MPEG-1 but also MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (aka DivX ;-) )standards; infringing this patent requires infringing the patents on MPEG. To infringe a patent, you have to infringe one claim, but to infringe a claim, you must infringe every part of that claim. As all other claims refer back to claim 1 (and the nearly identical claim 32), a fellow could circumvent this patent by using a compression technology other than one created by MPEG, such as the Ogg Tarkin video compression technology that Xiph.org is developing.

And as diakka said, two tuner cards in one box (or even in one household) could by a reasonable stretch of the imagination be considered infringement.

You're referring to the "doctrine of equivalents," which was recently severely narrowed. The patent explicitly names MPEG, and it does not say "or any other media encoding technology."

My Dad has one of the patents that I would consider prior art. But I guess we'll let the lawyers sort it all out. One clear difference with my dad's is that he described independent read and write heads, which seems to be unnecessary complexity considering the speed of hard drives these days, and the benefit derived from using off-the-shelf parts.

Here are links to the time-shifting patent and some other interesting ones...

• Stored program pay-per-play USPTO
• Video time-shifting apparatus USPTO
• Stored program pay-per-play USPTO

My Dad has one of the patents that I would consider prior art. But I guess we'll let the lawyers sort it all out. One clear difference with my dad's is that he described independent read and write heads, which seems to be unnecessary complexity considering the speed of hard drives these days, and the benefit derived from using off-the-shelf parts.

Here are links to the time-shifting patent and some other interesting ones...

• Stored program pay-per-play USPTO
• Video time-shifting apparatus USPTO
• Stored program pay-per-play USPTO

My Dad has one of the patents that I would consider prior art. But I guess we'll let the lawyers sort it all out. One clear difference with my dad's is that he described independent read and write heads, which seems to be unnecessary complexity considering the speed of hard drives these days, and the benefit derived from using off-the-shelf parts.

Here are links to the time-shifting patent and some other interesting ones...

• Stored program pay-per-play USPTO
• Video time-shifting apparatus USPTO
• Stored program pay-per-play USPTO

The patent for the "Multimedia time warping system" made me do quite the double-take. The first time you read it, it looks like a highly technical, restrictive patent on a non-obvious technology.

But that's where the double-take comes in. Look at the sorts of "restrictions" they're volunteering to put on their patent, so that it only covers their "non-obvious" technology:

User control commands are accepted and sent through the system. Watch out, you can fast-forward.

The video and audio components are stored on a storage device and when the program is requested for display, the video and audio components are extracted from the storage device and reassembled into an MPEG stream which is sent to a decoder. Damn, that's what my MPEG playback algorithm has been getting wrong-- I need to store my audio and video on a storage device! Damn, if they hadn't patented that bit, I would've stolen it.

The decoder converts the MPEG stream into TV output signals and delivers the TV output signals to a TV receiver. Those wizards at Tivo have done it again. Apparently, the secret to getting MPEG to play on TV is-- get this-- converting the MPEG stream into a TV-readable format.

The invention allows the user to store selected television broadcast programs while the user is simultaneously watching or reviewing another program. This, in fact, is a breakthrough. Have you ever tried to do this with your VCR? The instructions read something like: "During install, wall cord into first input, VCR cord from box to television. Then on watching, Input A the program watching, Input B the program being.". I don't know anyone who's ever done this-- they eventually gave up and watched TV upstairs.

It looks like the Patent Office, even if they have longer to review patents in the future, will run into the problem encountered in programming: it's easy to make a very complicated, confusing explanation for a very simple solution. Luckily for us (and, well, quite expensively for us), the courts have a lot more time to puzzle through all the bullshit.

A multimedia time warping system. The invention allows the user to store selected television broadcast programs while the user is simultaneously watching or reviewing another program.

Here's a little summary of the VirtualDub/ Microsoft patent dispute with links to more comprehensive articles.

Sincerely,
vergil
Vergil Bushnell

But you can patent them, the way Smuckers did.

How about 6197439? Just because they chose not to mention them in a press release doesn't mean they haven't protected their IP.

Gracenote fails to mention that when referring to their "intellectual property", they are mostly referring to the patent they have on the generating the unique key's for identifying a particular CD by segment count and length.


Which leads me to ask the question: if this is their whole IP claim, couldn't FreeDB simply use a different algorithm (say MD5) to generate a unique CD key ???

Go download the free, unlimited time viewer AlternaTIFF and install it.

Then go to the USPTO and search out your patent.

With the AlternaTIFF plug-in installed, you can click on the "Images" button and view each page (as well as print each page).

There are tiff plug-ins available for purchase that will let you print the whole patent, not just one page at a time. For example, the Black Ice Viewers have a free one (which I don't think you can print from) and a $39 one.

Delphion is effectively dead for casual use; long live USPTO. Here's a link to the patent on a .gov site.

10. A method for associating a recording with output of data on a local computer connected to a network, comprising:
determining an identifier from information associated with the recording;
comparing the identifier with records in a database maintained on a remote computer coupled to the local computer via the network; and
outputting remote data obtained from the network upon verification of access to the recording by the local computer, the remote data obtained via the network from at least one storage location dynamically determined based on the identifier.

13. A method as recited in claim 12, further comprising:
detecting insertion of the compact disc in the compact disc player; and
automatically starting a client program within the computer to cause the computer to access the network when the compact disc is inserted in the compact disc player.

What exactly have they patented?

US Patent 6,061,680.

As I understand it (IANAPL), they've patented not only the server-end approximate matching algorithm (which I think is fair enough to patent), but they've patented the way a 'CD ID' is generated by the CD client and sent to the server in order for it to do the search.

This could be replaced with the client simply sending the CD track lengths to the server, rather than combining them at the client end using a patented ID generation algorithm.

If Wozniak created his machines purely for self-actualising joy, then I guess he really didn't need these patents after all.

And here is US Patent 05940135, as mentioned above.

- David

"Oh, Lisa, that's a load of rich creamery butter." - Homer Simpson

If you have real life, documented examples of this being used before they filed, which looks like 18 Feb. 99, until you read the chain of continuity, where they claim priority from an earlier application filed 14 Jan. 97 (now patent #5898836), you can file a petition for re-examination or create an interference.
If as many of you say, you've been doing this for years, or it's been obvious to do each step, you can easily defeat this patent.

For the USPTO page on Apple's theme engine patent see: U.S. Patent # 6,104,391

Apple has at least one other theme related patent from around the same time, IIRC, and this cease and desist letter may a defense of that patent as well. As always, it's important to know the details before lobbing verbal hand grenades.

For the USPTO page on Apple's theme engine patent see: U.S. Patent # 6,104,391

Apple has at least one other theme related patent from around the same time, IIRC.

I have some interesting ideas about how to do this if someone wants to fund it. :-)

(Not using humming as input, though, because some IP squatter has already patented that.)

--Mike

In the web site outlining the patent the references section lists: "iDNS--Internationalized Domain Name System, by Center for Internet Research(http://www.apng.org/ids/, Jan. 1998.". Actually the web address is incorrect and should be http://www.apng.org/idns/ so I wonder if that is just a typo on the web page OR in the actual patent. If it's in the actual patent then ... doesn't the patent office at least check the references ?.

Anyway can someone explain to me how this referenced web site doesn't constitute prior art ?

I only quickly read the patent and the above reference but they seem to be presenting the same idea.

i.e. The http://www.apng.org/idns/ site suggests UTF-5 whereas the WALID patent suggests Unicode. See this site for a description of the two.

Well I just can't see how taking an existing idea which is clearly still in draft and changing one small aspect of it (ie. the encoding UTF-8 instead of UTF-5) can constitute a new idea. What the hell is the US Patent system doing to free trade if stuff like this is going on ?

Actually I've just been re-reading about Unicode aka UTF-8 & Co and it seems that UTF-5 is actually oneof the unicode formats. In this case how is specifying a patent that specifies "Unicode" all that different from specifying the same idea with one of the particular implementations of Unicode (ie. UTF-5) ?

Anyway given the large number of comments already and the fact that I only get posted at Score:1 I don't expect too many people to read this but I'd be interested in a comment from someone a bit more clued in to this than I am.

Thanks.

In the web site outlining the patent the references section lists: "iDNS--Internationalized Domain Name System, by Center for Internet Research(http://www.apng.org/ids/, Jan. 1998.". Actually the web address is incorrect and should be http://www.apng.org/idns/ so I wonder if that is just a typo on the web page OR in the actual patent. If it's in the actual patent then ... doesn't the patent office at least check the references ?.

Anyway can someone explain to me how this referenced web site doesn't constitute prior art ?

I only quickly read the patent and the above reference but they seem to be presenting the same idea.

i.e. The http://www.apng.org/idns/ site suggests UTF-5 whereas the WALID patent suggests Unicode. See this site for a description of the two.

Well I just can't see how taking an existing idea which is clearly still in draft and changing one small aspect of it (ie. the encoding UTF-8 instead of UTF-5) can constitute a new idea. What the hell is the US Patent system doing to free trade if stuff like this is going on ?

Actually I've just been re-reading about Unicode aka UTF-8 & Co and it seems that UTF-5 is actually oneof the unicode formats. In this case how is specifying a patent that specifies "Unicode" all that different from specifying the same idea with one of the particular implementations of Unicode (ie. UTF-5) ?

Anyway given the large number of comments already and the fact that I only get posted at Score:1 I don't expect too many people to read this but I'd be interested in a comment from someone a bit more clued in to this than I am.

Thanks.

In the web site outlining the patent the references section lists: "iDNS--Internationalized Domain Name System, by Center for Internet Research(http://www.apng.org/ids/, Jan. 1998.". Actually the web address is incorrect and should be http://www.apng.org/idns/ so I wonder if that is just a typo on the web page OR in the actual patent. If it's in the actual patent then ... doesn't the patent office at least check the references ?.

Anyway can someone explain to me how this referenced web site doesn't constitute prior art ?

I only quickly read the patent and the above reference but they seem to be presenting the same idea.

i.e. The http://www.apng.org/idns/ site suggests UTF-5 whereas the WALID patent suggests Unicode. See this site for a description of the two.

Well I just can't see how taking an existing idea which is clearly still in draft and changing one small aspect of it (ie. the encoding UTF-8 instead of UTF-5) can constitute a new idea. What the hell is the US Patent system doing to free trade if stuff like this is going on ?

Actually I've just been re-reading about Unicode aka UTF-8 & Co and it seems that UTF-5 is actually oneof the unicode formats. In this case how is specifying a patent that specifies "Unicode" all that different from specifying the same idea with one of the particular implementations of Unicode (ie. UTF-5) ?

Anyway given the large number of comments already and the fact that I only get posted at Score:1 I don't expect too many people to read this but I'd be interested in a comment from someone a bit more clued in to this than I am.

Thanks.

The patent describes an obvious engineering solution. Walid Tout (the "inventor") should go into the engineering hall of shame: either he wasn't smart enough to realize that this was obvious, or he was irresponsible enough to patent it anyway.

Pay up...

http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO 2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r= 12&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft00&s1=perl&s2=ibm&OS=perl+ AND+ibm&RS=perl+AND+ibm

Customized Internet content is provided to a requesting client device using an intercepting agent based on the capabilities of the requesting client. The agent, typically at the web server to which the client request is directed intercepts a request made by a requesting client device for a file from a web server. The agent detects client device capability information about the requesting client device, such as display or memory capabilities. The client request is redirected to a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) according to the detected client device capability information to retrieve a version of the requested file.

Scientific American article
From the article: ""I was kind of interested in pushing the system to see how far you could go with allowable claims," explains Schlafly, a member of the League for Programming Freedom, an organization that opposes software patents. Although Schlafly can now sue anybody for using his numbers, he is not worried about people infringing on his rights. "When you get to numbers that are so big that nobody has used them before, well, there are lots of them up there," he says."

Patent number 5,373,560

Digital Cable and WebTV better watch out... Not to give these fools any more ideas on who they can sue... but this patent seems to be extremely broad!
This patent seems to cover Digital Cable and WebTV.

>"Secondly, the remote query and data retrieval system can be connected to the remote host via an auxiliary digital I/O line 37. An example of such a line is derived from a commercial FM broadcast station and uses one of its two sidebands to transmit digital data (so called "silent radio"). This is a low bandwidth (under 2400 baud) channel of the type used to provide announcements on "Times Square" like displays."

The Atvef-A data, used by Microsoft's WebTV gets data from TV broadcasts in just this manner, and that data is used to retrieve AV data.

>"Third, as noted above, the EUS 10 can interface the host 11 via a video input line 26a. This type of signal is derived, for example, from the Cable TV (CATV) Adapter's (i.e. Sprucer) 22 identified above. In an operational example, a remote query could be initiated via the adapter remote control 24 which would then be transmitted to the local cable service center 26 which, by prearrangement, will forward it to the server 11. The query, and its associated response, may be preformulated and prestored at the server 11 or even at an EUS requiring only periodic updates via a packeted query answer (i.e. PQA; a Prestored Query Answer). After being cleared via an appropriate security check (e.g. subscriber password), the server 11 may initiate an AV (Audio-Visual) response to the EUS 10. The channel through which the specified AV response is sent to the EUS 10, and as also designated by pre-arrangement, is tuned via the CATV adapter."

This is how Digital Cable works -- which all cable companies are migrating to.

Here is the actual patent, courtesy of the USPTO...

... The personal terminal is credit-card sized...

Look here or here and here or here

... The personal terminal is credit-card sized...

Look here or here and here or here