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Also, slight correction to what I said in my first post above - not ALL applications get published, because it is possible to opt out by giving up most foreign patent rights. Few applicants do this, though, with the result that most applications now are being published.

Must be a slow Tuesday, so let's perk things up with some software patent misinformation. If anyone takes the time to read the patent claims, they would notice that "The use ..." is not claimed. But who needs accuracy in reporting, eh?

Lets make that link a little better, shall we?

Here you go

That's what I get for not previewing first

Kleenex has lost the ability to copyright/trademark (I never remember which) their name because it's become common usage.


This is patently false.

They actually sent a cease and desist because use as a verb is clear signs that a trademark is becoming (or has become) generic. See TMEP 1209.01(c). As such, another party can use that as a defense if Google tries to claim trademark infringement. So I'm not surprised they sent the cease & desist and would have done the same thing.

Anybody recall the Xerox ad of a few years ago... "There are two R's in XEROX(r) "? The whole purpose of that ad was to get people to realize that a) XEROX is a trademark and b) to stop using it as a verb (i.e., "I xeroxed this article for my friend") which causes it to lose its trademark status.

Trademarks, though a form of intellectual property, are more about consumer protection than about restricting people from using certain words.

-A

review patent applications to assess if they comply with basic format and legal rules;

determine the scope of the protection claimed by the inventor;

research relevant technologies to compare similar prior inventions;

and write a final opinion with advice about the technical and legal requirements for the particular invention compared with earlier ones.

review patent applications to assess if they comply with basic format and legal rules;

determine the scope of the protection claimed by the inventor;

research relevant technologies to compare similar prior inventions;

and write a final opinion with advice about the technical and legal requirements for the particular invention compared with earlier ones.

Yes, there is an archive of bullshit patents that you can search, going as far back as 1976. Here it is.

Interestingly for people citing CVS and the like as prior art, and that its an obvious application of CVS - they seem to be claiming that this patent covers version control of code too.

Read the text of the patent.

"As will be understood by those familiar with the art, the invention may be embodied in other specific forms without departing from the spirit or essential characteristics thereof. Website development is just one of many practical applications for the inventions disclosed herein. Other applications for the inventions disclosed herein include developing source code, media files (e.g., for CD-ROM multimedia), a media engine, and etc. Accordingly, the disclosure of the present invention is intended to be illustrative, but not limiting, of the scope of the invention, which is set forth in the following claims." (emphasis added)

Wow. That's a pretty stunning claim!

(I know this kind of 'it encompasses everything' language is in every patent, but nonetheless, my gob is well and truly smacked).

If you're going to make this assertion, you should say exactly what is "so much more" about this patent. I read Interwoven's press release. They say that the patent contains 13 claims.

I read all 13 claims of the patent (go to the Patent and trademark office and do a "Quick Search" for patent #6505212, and saw an exact description of all the features CVS and Clear Case users have enjoyed for years. Six years ago I built a system using PVCS to manage source code and a 7 platform build system, and three years ago I adapted it to CVS for management of a website managed by 45 writers and programmers. It included a staging area, individual or team work areas, and the ability to search versions by content.

Following the 13 claims are the details of the patent; there is nothing there that cannot be done with CVS and some perl or python scripts. The "virtualization module" is similar to perl I wrote to run the site. The user typed in the URL with the CVS label and they would get the site in their browser as it appeared when labeled. Clear Case did the same thing with a file system view.

Nothing personal against Interwoven; if their product works it's worth the money, but it does not deserve a patent.

(I am not AL, nor am I ANAL)

First off, read the actual patent, not the press release.

The patent does indeed include version control elements, but further defines exactly what their product does. See section 2, for example:

"The system of claim 1, further comprising a plurality of work areas configured to allow different users to create and maintain web content to be displayed on a website, wherein the staging area is adapted to receive web content changes of files modified in the work areas and is configured to check for conflicts in web content received from two or more work areas. "

There are very many products out there that do version control. But, there are very few that provide robust Content Management, which includes version control, but also includes a system to quickly and directly retrieve content for a web site/application and other such ammenities described in the patent. You would never do such a thing with CVS, unless you're insane.

What this does endanger is projects like Zope with it's CMS framework, which does alot of what is described in this patent. Versioning, browsable "file system" (html browsable, not unix mountable :p), submission and workflow associated with the content, embeded webserver, etc. These are features which parallel Interwoven's offerings (albeit at a smaller scale).

So, having said all this, I don't see why everyone is freaking out. The patent obviously addresses a complex Content Management system, not a simple version control system. I'm sure a simple-minded judge would be able to tell the difference once given the facts.

> It seems like the USPO is pretty lenient when it comes to awarding software patents.

That's apparently true for any kind of patent, see this or this link (gathered from this excellent article by James Gleick).

I guess my patent application for "Achieving sexual stimulation in males by applying a repeated vertical up/down motion to the male reproductive organ using either the left or the right hand" has a real chance to be approved, then. Unless anyone here wants to step forward and claim prior "art" (ahem), of course.

> It seems like the USPO is pretty lenient when it comes to awarding software patents.

That's apparently true for any kind of patent, see this or this link (gathered from this excellent article by James Gleick).

I guess my patent application for "Achieving sexual stimulation in males by applying a repeated vertical up/down motion to the male reproductive organ using either the left or the right hand" has a real chance to be approved, then. Unless anyone here wants to step forward and claim prior "art" (ahem), of course.

According to the US patent office: "Each year the USPTO receives approximately 300,000 patent applications." (from http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/utility/utili ty.htm)

Some of these patents are no doubt software patents. And each patent application costs money to process. Even though there is apparently a fee for submitting an application I doubt the patent office is making profit. And as it is a US government funded organization the US taxpayers are paying for the process.

Investigations related to prior art surely cost a lot additinal money. If an application has already been accepted nullifying it can't be an easy process. Ultimately the whole mess must cost a grand sum... guesses anyone?

I'm rambling, but I can't help feeling that the money could be better spent somewhere else.

here is a clickable link to the patent at the USPTO.

Here is a link to the actual patent.

The US Patent Office has a page on "What can be Patented"

Some interesting excerpts for those to lazy to click through:

"...any person who 'invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent,' subject to the conditions and requirements of the law."

The patent law specifies that the subject matter must be "useful."

"... patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc..."

The US Patent Office has a page on "What can be Patented"

Some interesting excerpts for those to lazy to click through:

"...any person who 'invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent,' subject to the conditions and requirements of the law."

The patent law specifies that the subject matter must be "useful."

"... patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc..."

Unfortionately, this rapidly degenerates to making any development nearly impossible as you have to do a patent search for every thing your company does. Or else you just do it, and worry about the licensing later.


You say this as if its not happening or hasn't happened in the past.
ANY large, medium and most small developers, manufactures have ALWAYS be forced to be patent-aware.

Whether you manufacture widgets or WinWidjets, ignoring a simple search on uspto.gov is incredibly foolish.

I've worked in R&D at a medium sized manufacturer of digital printers and we constantly did patent searches. In fact, you learn to adapt the patent search at the very beginning of the development process. Its amazing that you actually learn what stumbling blocks will be in your way by what was patented in the past to fix them.

The patent process was designed as the FIRST open-source development process. It works like, you come up with an invention, as long as you share with everyone your idea, then you get to use your invention for a number or years.

How do the IP laws in place in Western economies constitute shooting oneself in the foot?

One problem is the problem of doing an exhaustive check of copyrights and patents. Though trademark checks are easy (use Google search), copyrights and patents are much harder to check in an automatic fashion. Given only the source code of a program, it's nearly impossible to determine whether or not that program infringes any of the more than two million subsisting U.S. patents. Given only the notes and rhythms of a melody, it's nearly impossible to determine whether or not that melody infringes any of the millions of subsisting U.S. copyrights on published musical works. Though copyright law requires access to the original work in addition to similarity, if the original work has hit the pop charts, the burden of proof seems to fall on the alleged infringer to disprove access (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music).

The terms are too long. Why did Congress feel the need to grant 20 years of exclusive monopoly protection over something as simple as sending the user's identifying information along with the request to purchase something (the Amazon one-click shopping patent)? And why did Congress see fit to grant upwards of 120 years of monopoly on a melody?

Some people have much better ideas to profit from...

Patent 5319777 referenced by one of NCR's patents claims "multidimensional spreadsheets" that can be viewed in sections at multiple computers but updated individually, affecting the entire spreadsheet for other users. Obviously, this is just a (poorly implemented) relational database. However, without knowing the mathematical background of relational databases, the typical patent clerk probably wouldn't relate the two. The problem with the patent system is that the most convoluted terms can be used to describe a precise, mathematical concept and can make two implementations indistinguishible from each other.

As you can see at this link, the USPTO seems to indicate a cost of apx $1100 USD to get a patent. To have the patent last for a full 20 years additional maintanance fees need to be paid over the course of that time. Those additional fees ~3000 USD for a grand total of less than 5k US for 20 years.

Actually someone may have clued them in on this one.

What everyone forgets is that if anyone in the US was doing what your patent describes before you filed for the patent, then your patent is no good. And it doesn't cost billions of dollars to get a patent invalidated. First you need to get sued for violating a patent. Then you need to show some proof that at least one person was doing whatever the patent says before the filing date. Then you win. Given that it costs a minimum of $20k to get a patent, all this company has done is waste lots of money. If it ever tries to bring suit it'll spend even more money and it'll have nothing to show for it because these patents all seem to cover stuff that people've been doing with computers for a while. I doubt you will ever see a suit on any of those patents. It's like the guy who patented swinging. He spent at least $20k to prove that he doesn't understand the patent system. All I need is to bring in some witnesses that'll say they were swinging before Nov. 17th 2000 and he has officially wasted a lot of money. Patent examiners can only work with what they find in literature and trade journals etc. Courts can use anything you bring them.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6368227'.WKU.&OS=PN/6368227&RS=P N/6368227

How about Penn Jillette's (of Penn & Teller) patent for arousing women in a hot tub?

Well, of course. That's the whole issue, isn't it? Haven't you heard about this?

However, many patents that sound like a joke to most people have turned out to be quite serious, unfortunately.

At this point, I hope you see the folly of your comment.

At this point, I hope you feel pretty stupid for attempting to prove to me that the USPTO is one fucked up nest of clueless bureaucrats, which I really didn't need. But thanks, anyway.

Any prior art will have to predate, by more than 1 year, the filing date of the original application.

The abstract:

Currently, a web site stores Internet data indicating file access status for the files that have been accessed in response to requests from web browsers. Unfortunately, the Internet data are kept as a set of separate and non-correlated data records that are chronologically arranged according to the times at which the requests have been received and processed. Consequently, the Internet data are not arranged meaningful to management and business operation. The present invention correlates web page files (HTML, SHTML, DHTML, or CGI files) with subject areas (such as sports, news, entertainment, restaurant, shopping, computing, business, health, family, travel and weather). In this way, the Internet data are presented in a format meaningful to management and business operation.

Patent 6085223 describes the method to look up the very same patent using the USPTO database by clicking on this url! The patent office is violating the patent!

At least, by making patents available on the internet like this they make them sort of "open source" so that stupid patents like this one will be challenged as soon as someone finds out.

Another shining example of the US patent office's brilliance. What child has never done that on a swing before? The children at the US patent office, obviously...

From patent 6,169,997 :

The present invention correlates web page files (HTML, SHTML, DHTML, or CGI files) with subject areas (such as sports, news, entertainment, restaurant, shopping, computing, business, health, family, travel and weather)...

Isn' t this what search engines such as Yahoo! have been doing since at least before 1996???

Other References
President William J. Clinton, Vice President Albert Gore Jr., "A Framework For Global Electronic Commerce," Jul. 1997, at http://www.iitf.nist.gov/eleccomm/ecomm.htm, pp. 1-22.

WetCat wrote:
>Assume we found some "Smoldering guns". To whom shall we show the evidence?

You show it to the USPTO by doing a "Third Party Submission of Prior Art" using USPTO procedures prior to 60 days after the application was published (i.e. 60 days after 6-Feb-2003). After that time, you have to serve papers on the inventor, lawyers, assignees, etc. to inform them of the prior art and thus force them to perform their "Duty of Candor" and submit the prior art for you to the USPTO.

bob wyman

• Say what you will about the patent office, they still reject 75% of all patent applications.. why are you so sure this one will go through?

Look here, page 17.

A data security method and apparatus that provides an exceptional degree of security at low computational cost. The data security arrangement differs from known data security measures in several fundamental aspects. Most notably, the content of the message is not sent with the encrypted data. Rather, the encrypted data consists of pointers to locations within a virtual matrix, a large (arbitrarily large), continuously-changing array of values. The encryption technique is therefore referred to as Virtual Matrix Encryption. Furthermore, the data security arrangement uses a very large key of one million bits or more which creates a level of security much higher than any other existing method. The key is not transferred but is instead created from a file of any size that is available on both a computer used to send a secure message and a computer used to receive a secure message. The term Virtual Key Cryptographic as used herein to refer to techniques in which a key is recreated at a remote location from an electronic file without any transmission of the key itself. The file may be a system file, a file downloaded from the Internet, etc. A smaller, transaction-specific key, e.g., a 2,048 bit key, is sent end-to-end and is used in conjunction with the very large key to avoid a security hazard in instances where the same file is used repeatedly to create the very large key.

Results of Search in 1976 to present db for: ABST/java AND AN/sun: 32 patents. Hits 1 through 32 out of 32

And even more, including this one that pretty much covers any three-tier DB application development in Java: 5,899,990

Microsoft's CEOs have made it "patently" clear that they intend to restrict competing .Net implementations by cultivating Microsoft's patents, such as United States Patent Application #20020059425 "Distributed computing services platform" which covers the design and inter-operation of .NET based implementations.
Although there is prior art examples of individual technologies such as the JVM etc, Microsoft patents such as the one mentioned, define and claim the interoperation of the components, in such a way that any re-implementations will be sure to be covered by the patents. This remains true even for the Microsoft specs submited to standard

In comparison, Sun has granted the Apache and all open source developers FULL access to the specs, test kits and granted the full rights to develop competing products under the JSPA . Sun has also fully pened up the Java development standards process under the new Java Community Process (JCP) . Even to the point of granting full open source re-implentations of J2EE such as JBoss ...

JBoss received the green light last week, after Sun told ComputerWire that it would allow all of the APIs contained in J2EE 1.4 to be open sourced. Fleury had expressed concern that certain critical APIs, including Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 2.1, would be not be made available to open source organizations.

However, Java Community Process director Onno Kluyt said: "Sun's plan with 1.4 is that although it started before JCP 2.5, by the time it ships it will allow the creation of independent implementations. I don't think the APIs are that interesting, because the license that sits on top of J2EE will allow that [independent implementations]".

There those that claim that .NET is open to re-implementation, but until Microsoft make a simliar public legal declaration to Sun's JSPA, any .NET reimplementation represents a pending legal mindfield.

It's really a given to science.

We simply just need better vehicles.

Perhaps a goal is that of Spaceship of Ezekiel

Go ahead and take a look at the patent for a wheel within a wheel. How obvious it is once seen, how foolish one feels thinging someing more complicated.

The simplicity/safty needs to be improved on what we have.

On this "anniversary" of Open Source, we should be thinking about what has been accomplished and what needs to be done next. For instance, while the OS community has proven the value of providing open implementations, it is now time to start protecting and defending the community's right and ability to create those implmenations in the future. The best way to do this is to start pursuing "Open Ideas" or "Open Patents."

In recent years there has been an explosion of patents and patent applications by companies that seek to monopolize the exploitation of ideas and methods in software. With every patent granted, the scope of future OS projects is limited just a little bit more. Without going into flame wars about the patent system, I can say that there is something useful that we can do today to protect OS in the future.

A patent can be prevented if one can prove "prior art" exists that describes the method that the filer wishes to patent and, the USPTO accepts "Internet Publications" as prior art, using the "posted date" on messages as the date of priority. Thus, if people with good ideas document those ideas on the Web, from the instant that the description of a method is posted, then all future patents on that method are blocked forever unless the inventor can prove that they came up with the idea before the posting on the web. Thus, by adopting a discipline of identifying and posting ideas that others might try to patent, we can establish a collection of "Open Ideas" or "Open Patents" that block others from monopolizing the methods in the future.
It would also be useful for those in the OS community to become active in reviewing new patent applications as they are published by the USPTO every Thursday, and use the established procedures for "third party filing of prior art" to ensure that patent examiners don't issue patents on ideas that should remain Open.

Open Source isn't enough. We need Open Ideas to enable the Open Source of the future.

bob wyman

See: http://www.pubsub.org for more info.

On this "anniversary" of Open Source, we should be thinking about what has been accomplished and what needs to be done next. For instance, while the OS community has proven the value of providing open implementations, it is now time to start protecting and defending the community's right and ability to create those implmenations in the future. The best way to do this is to start pursuing "Open Ideas" or "Open Patents."

In recent years there has been an explosion of patents and patent applications by companies that seek to monopolize the exploitation of ideas and methods in software. With every patent granted, the scope of future OS projects is limited just a little bit more. Without going into flame wars about the patent system, I can say that there is something useful that we can do today to protect OS in the future.

A patent can be prevented if one can prove "prior art" exists that describes the method that the filer wishes to patent and, the USPTO accepts "Internet Publications" as prior art, using the "posted date" on messages as the date of priority. Thus, if people with good ideas document those ideas on the Web, from the instant that the description of a method is posted, then all future patents on that method are blocked forever unless the inventor can prove that they came up with the idea before the posting on the web. Thus, by adopting a discipline of identifying and posting ideas that others might try to patent, we can establish a collection of "Open Ideas" or "Open Patents" that block others from monopolizing the methods in the future.
It would also be useful for those in the OS community to become active in reviewing new patent applications as they are published by the USPTO every Thursday, and use the established procedures for "third party filing of prior art" to ensure that patent examiners don't issue patents on ideas that should remain Open.

Open Source isn't enough. We need Open Ideas to enable the Open Source of the future.

bob wyman

See: http://www.pubsub.org for more info.

On this "anniversary" of Open Source, we should be thinking about what has been accomplished and what needs to be done next. For instance, while the OS community has proven the value of providing open implementations, it is now time to start protecting and defending the community's right and ability to create those implmenations in the future. The best way to do this is to start pursuing "Open Ideas" or "Open Patents."

In recent years there has been an explosion of patents and patent applications by companies that seek to monopolize the exploitation of ideas and methods in software. With every patent granted, the scope of future OS projects is limited just a little bit more. Without going into flame wars about the patent system, I can say that there is something useful that we can do today to protect OS in the future.

A patent can be prevented if one can prove "prior art" exists that describes the method that the filer wishes to patent and, the USPTO accepts "Internet Publications" as prior art, using the "posted date" on messages as the date of priority. Thus, if people with good ideas document those ideas on the Web, from the instant that the description of a method is posted, then all future patents on that method are blocked forever unless the inventor can prove that they came up with the idea before the posting on the web. Thus, by adopting a discipline of identifying and posting ideas that others might try to patent, we can establish a collection of "Open Ideas" or "Open Patents" that block others from monopolizing the methods in the future.
It would also be useful for those in the OS community to become active in reviewing new patent applications as they are published by the USPTO every Thursday, and use the established procedures for "third party filing of prior art" to ensure that patent examiners don't issue patents on ideas that should remain Open.

Open Source isn't enough. We need Open Ideas to enable the Open Source of the future.

bob wyman

See: http://www.pubsub.org for more info.

Like in Nintendo patent 6,468,160

No, he's quite right. I can't search the trademarks section of the US Patent Office site because their servers are overloaded, but if you really feel like looking it up, the address is www.uspto.gov

I've looked the same information up myself awhile ago. Virtually all CDs carry the official Phillips/Sony "CD" insignial. Anything that doesn't measure up to what Phillips and Sony require of their CDs cannot bear their trademark.

Now whether or not the concept that anyone who sells a crippled CD is commiting fraud, because everyone knows what a CD looks like (and doesn't bother checking for the "CD" logo, because they know it's there) is debateable. I think that it's perfectly reasonable to use the arguement to hang the people trying to manufacture the crippled disks to dry. their lawyers and the courts may have a different opinion, though.

The funny thing about that is Marconi tried to patent his radio device but the patent office, becouse the device only worked short distances, said that it had no use. If that isn't irony I don't know what is. :)

Are you talking about this patent? If they refused the claim, it would be rather odd for them to give it a patent number and all, wouldn't it?

Looks to me like the Patent Office site might be in violation itself! Check out their navigation.

The claim categories are aimed at a browser and a method of browsing.

Museumtours does not provide a browser, nor performs a method of browsing.

When you look e.g. at claim 20, one of the steps is 'viewing parts of the document'. This goes for independent claim 24 as well. Well, I do not expect museumtours to watch every time their page is accessed (will be quite a few times after all these articles at /.). As a European patent attorney trainee, I would have written the claims differently, claiming only steps a computer would perform, under control of the browser programme.

So, in my opinion, it would not be possible to defend that museumtour infringes independent claims 20 and 24, let alone claims dependent on those two.

Claim 1 is aimed at a browser. When reading the text + examining the drawings, Netscape is actually prior art in my opinion. AFAIK, frames were already there in 1996 (filing date of the document), yielding claim 1 invalid.

Besides that, the browser does not comprise input devices in the scope of the application; in claim 3 e.g. they are specified as a keyboard.

Well, I do not have the time right now to continue for all claims, but with a proper knowledgable attorney, Museumtours should manage.

BTW: I am not a US patent attorney!

Isn't that some sort of conflict of interest? Of course, their online browsing site was probably not available in 1996... Can anyone concur?

Besides, this patent doesn't claim a particular document structure, but rather a computer application for browsing in a particular way. They are probably presenting their patent as a process rather than a software as it is, in my non-expert opinion, clearly claimed.

Form the patent's description:

This invention relates to computer applications for viewing documents, and in particular, to a computer program for viewing documents having a predefined structure.

Why aren't they sueing MS or AOL for their computer application for viewing documents?

I'm pretty sure this will all blow over really quickly. It's a really big pile of bullshit...