Slashdot Mirror
Publishing On Internet Patented
nchip writes: "Emedicene has been granted
patent for "Group Publising System," announced on
Infotoday.
Quotes from the article: 'The software is unique -- it is the only enterprise software that allows all production to
take place on the Internet.' ... '"Our system is a complete authoring, editing, and version-control system with complete
management-tracking tools and a built-in communications network."' That Sounds a lot like Zope or wikiwikiweb." Or to pick something even more (ahem) prior, say CVS!
S I T E
great comedy company.
Similarly, all the stuff described in this patent is really straightforward. I'm sure the code is copyrightable, but can you really patent a feature set? I guess so. Okay, then I guess it's time to go review all the code I've ever written and see if I've got any patentable feature sets lying around...
Oh, go on, check out my job.
Sounds a lot like FrontPage... Editing on the net, multi-user, integration with word processing (Word), version control...
Why Open Source doesn't patent is because they usually don't intend to sue.
That's my point... they can hold the patent without caring who infringes on it... the only time it becomes an issue is when someone else tries to patent the same technology in order to agressively control it; they won't be able to get the patent because it will already be in the hands of someone who is more than happy to let the technology be used freely.
Isn't having a software patent like having an idea patent?
:)
So I'm announcing my patent on thinking about software developement, and there shall be a fee of $15.00/hour per person to all non-GNU developers.
Come see my website.
http://come.to/streiff
I'd have to agree that it is already an existing concept, implemented to some degree or other in many software packages. I wrote docs for a product that could do this 3 years ago. I think it's dead now, but it essentially allowed all of this, including the permissions. Curiously, many features of Lotus Notes also could fit within the parameters described... I think they'll have a hard time enforcing it.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
But, IANAL. For that matter, IANAPL. Hell, IANAKW, even.
{PL==>Patent Lawyuh; KW==>Karma Whore}
--
-- Geof F. Morris
Now next time i see my aunt and her cats do i have to pay royalties for the simple enjoyment that red dots bring?
No, I cannot cite any evidence. I do remember reading somewhere a quote from an employee of the PTO to that effect. I don't really need evidence, though, because I can plot the relationship over time of the PTO's budget to the number of patent applications filed. They are getting paid less and less to handle more and more work. There is also the fact that payscales in government work almost never keep pace with economic up-turns, so that the difference in wages between the public and private sectors is greater the longer a boom lasts. Then there is the fact that the budget for the PTO is in danger of being cut (for this, I do have a cite: http://www.ied.pios.c om/ news/indnews/Eng_Managers/IN7_12_2000.asp). So, even if you don't accept the evidence that lack of money is not the problem, you must agree that cutting funding is a step in the wrong direction, unless you think we should abolish the PTO altogether and replace it with something else.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
And where do you propose we find someone who is an expert in computer software, and electronics, and electrical systems, and mechanics, and biotech, and chemistry, and materials science, etc., etc.?
We don't. The people handing out these patents (in most if not all of these areas) have already demonstrated their incompetence. My solution doesn't do anything to eliminate the incompetence (one could reasonably argue that a competent patent office would be even more dangerous), it simply limits the harm the patent office can cause to those patents an individual patent advocate can process and approve in a single day.
If we can't eliminate the USPTO (which should be our first priority) we should at least limit its ability to lock up and corden off vast areas of intellectual and business endeavor.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
What about the WebDAV that has been development? see the IETF page or the webdav site, and let's not forget the Apache webdav module mod_dav.
Plus there is RFC 2518 for it -
http://andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/rfc/rfc2518.html
While there may not be a 100% fit, there could be enough to invalidate this patent.
Mailing yourself something doesn't work as a poor man's copyright since the post office doesn't guarantee anything about the postmarked envelope except that the envelope itself was legally mailed by the date it is postmarked. The enveloped could be marked or unmarked, sealed or unsealed. It is completely possible for you to mail yourself an unsealed envelope and keep for three years before putting information in it an sealing it. Same goes for writing on the envelope.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt, Bernard is watching.
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod
The PTO is finding it difficult to retain Examiners. The management recently proposed a 10-15% pay increase in exchange for , among other things, eliminating all the paper files. This proposal was rejected by over 80% of examiners polled, recently. For a discussion of this and other issues from the Patent Examiner's point of view look at the POPA Website. BTW, I am not sure of the current statistics, but to reach 100% of their quota an examiner is allocated, on average, about 15 hours (the eactual figure depends on Grade and "Art"; Computers and Bioptecch get more, buggy whips less) to examine an application, from start to finish
Where I work (electronics manufacturing) we use a software system known as a Product Data Management (PDM) system.
PDM systems let you create documents (typically product designs), revise them, submit them to work flows for approval or futher work, and then store them for retrieval by other users.
Examples are:
Many of these products have web interfaces already.
I think I'll patent a buisiness method of starting a company to create dumb patents and then extort money from companies that can't afford the resources to prove them invalid. Sheesh!
What?
Ancient word processor system. Formally used by dead white males to foment inovation and revolutionary ideas in the 18th century.
If abortion should be tax payer funded to protect poor women's 4th amendment rights, why not buy them guns to protect their 2nd amendment rights?
How many people have to suffer a harsh punishment before "cruel and unusual" returns zero?
That was actually suggested back in May, in the article about the first Dickenson/O'Reilly debate. The second debate is tonight, in the DC area, btw.
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. -- Aaron Burr
A company called Synthesis does the same thing for financial document preparation.
illegitimii non ingravare
At WPI in the computer science building there are posters and signs everywhere that the US-PTO posted to try and get people to come work there. The trouble is that noone wants to. My senior year as an undergrad I took an IP law class, and they came to recruit. Even in a class where people chose to learn this stuff noone was interested. I think that this is the real problem. Perhaps *you* want to work there?
They need to hire a few tech people to review tech patents.
Actually, they need to get support from Congress, who has consistently picked the PTO's review budgets clean for other appropriations.
Actually, they need to revamp the system so that the abstract of the patent is announced and posted publicly, while the specifics remain in seclusion, for the two years it takes to process the patent application.
Having the abstract posted publically would allow the "open patent" watchdogs help the PTO find prior art, without giving away specific competitive advantage, which the patent was designed to offer.
[
The problem with lots of patents is that you don't have to prove you did it first, you just have to get the patent first... so why don't all the unique Open Source products out there grab up some patents real quick like? They don't have to enforce them, just make sure no one else can get a patent for the same idea and screw the rest of us over...
Okay, between this, Amazon, and that NAT patent attempt that is in the works, WHAT THE FUCK is wrong at the patent office? Don't they like, LOOK into technologies to see where they are being used already and to see if standards documents are published to be accessible? Are they issuing patents based on buzzwords that corporate entities are slipping in, or are they being bought off by corporations, or are they just so stupid that they can't say "no" to a computing technology patent request anymore?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Looks more like WebDAV should be cited as prior art, though. Or perhaps Mozilla's own development system, which has been running for well over two years and can be applied to Websites (Mozilla's own Website does this, in fact).
Chalk up another boneheaded patent for the USPTO. Someone really needs to give Congress the heads-up on these people, you know?
----------
Most of the items in the claim have been done by Notes for a decade now, and the newer Internet related items have been around for some years. In fact the whole GPS thing sounds like a pretty easy Notes project.
For example, the hard copy Notes manuals were just printouts of Notes databases that were group authored, versioned, with role based security (editor/author/reader/reviewer), integrated e-mail with build in address book,enabled over lan/wan/internet, accessible through URLS for documents, and hierarchical sections, blah blah blah.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I though patents were only supposed to be granted on specific methodologies, not general practices. The system they're describing is one means to an end, and it should be patentable, but it's not the only means to that end.
To use the archetypal example, can the first person who imagined using a computer to move bits of text around receive a patent on the concept of "word processing"?
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
I like the idea, but such an organization would certainly need funding, as it would be a full-time job for many people to try to track down the prior art and/or experts in various fields to challenge these patents, and I'm not sure how you go about challenging a patent without going to court, which will cost even more money. Who would likely be interested in funding such an organization? Who would it benefit most?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
Sounds like my proposed constitutional amendment:
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Thanks for the info, my knowledge of Zope is (obviously) limited. However, I am not sure one would be able to use Zope to invalidate this patent. Whatever this eMedicine software really is, it seems to do quite a bit more than Zope does (specifically workflow -- which can be a pretty major thing if it is to be industrial strength). Apparently one can extend ZClasses to have Zope perform workflow management, but I don't see this being an entirely trivial task. I do not pretend to know how the prior art system actually works, but I'm not sure Zope would fit because it is functionally a (potentially small) subset of the functionality in the GPS. The two examples I mentioned in my previous post may work as they appear to do *everything* that the GPS software does.
But the point in my original post is that it is all about workflow. Content management without workflow is a fish without water (it's just good eating). Properly implemented support for workflow processes can be invaluable and is not (IMHO) obvious.
To say slashdot is a "content management system" is a bit of a stretch. surely you can author, edit and store stuff but only minimally. versioning does not exist (as far as I know). by this stretch nearly everything is a content management system, even my copy of Quicken with which i can create and edit quicken files and using the Windows file system and explorer for version control, i've got pretty much everything there. Hopefully you see my point. Whether you agree with it or not is not my concern.
Is it just me or was this the point of the WWW? many scientists could modify pages either on the unix machines themselves or download and modify locally. Then upload(http push).
Then someone added version control with cvs, chatting with talk and ytalk and zephyr. and boom. Prior art.
I am not sure of the order here but I use a unix environment and the web for this purpose regularly.
Ignoring the fact that cvs, zope, and wikiwikiweb do nothing like this, and ignoring the fact that the other prior art brought up by posters wasn't patented (if it was indeed the first such thing, shouldn't they have patented it themselves?). Indeed, the Interwoven website turns up 1 hit for the word 'patent,' and the link doesn't mention any patents of theirs.
Also, Emedicine is not meant to be a purely doctor-oriented site. Part of the big plan was to publish not only a quality medical textbook, but also a medical reference for ordinary folks in order to better equip them when they see a doctor.
So, did they patent something? Yes. Was it insubstantiated by prior art? Not that I've seen mentioned yet. Is there anything inherently wrong with what they patented? No. Recall that just because someone takes two known ideas and puts them together doesn't mean that the patent is any less valid.
If we can then disregard that the patent (however possibly silly) is invalid, I'd think that slashdot would certainly love the idea (and actuality) of Emedicine. Certainly everytime slashdot posts a story about e-medicine in general, the crowd goes wild over the prospect of being diagnosed from their home or being able to have multiple doctors teleconference about their condition. Yet, mention it as a big bad patent story with a bunch of distorted facts and suddenly we'd all like Emedicine's CEO's head on a stick.
"Open Source, Closed Minds. We are Slashdot," indeed.
Franklin studied electricity mostly as a scientist, not as an inventor. To my knowledge, he created no useful inventions with electricity. (He did some of the first pioneering work on it, and is the person responsible for the electron being "negative". He theorized that electricity was caused by a flow between a surplus of something and a shortage of something. He then assigned '-' to one and '+' to another, noting that he had a 50-50 shot of being right. Unfortunately, the dice didn't go his way.)
I also don't think Franklin ever patented anything, even his real inventions. (The Franklin stove, bifocals, etc.)
The cake is a pie
Hey, these guys should try CVS. I am going to e-mail them a copy. I'll attach the kernel source tree while I'm at it.
... someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't Lynx (the best browser!) had this support since well before 1995?
Even if not, how on Earth is this not an obvious "invention?" Making programs easier to use (which is exactly what this is doing -- allowing the software to add in the http:// or ftp:// for you) has been a common theme of software design since the personal computer was born.
You know, I often wonder who gets employed at the patent office. How does their hiring process work, and what kinds of people do they recruit? They obviously don't have any computer-literate employees, which seems odd since they need knowledgeable people to review the growing surge of computer- and Internet-related patents. If they are hiring computer-literate people, they must not be hiring them from the right place -- maybe they should start going to job fairs at Universities. I, for one, would be happy to have a well-paid opportunity to put a stop to some of this madness.
Just my 2 cents worth...
kugano
What they're talking about sounds a lot like content management which is certainly NOT new - and is also not what Zope does.
Just another dumb patent.
we used a system in my English class in college that did all of that. The name fails me, but it was 3 years ago or so...
Was there nobody to challenge this patent when it was filed? I mean, I know that the Amazon patents are hard to swallow, but this is downright ridiculous. How did this get through the patent office unnoticed?
I think this brings to light one of the primary problems with patenting software processes. There is no one around to present prior work even when it is right underneath our noses. Perhaps we should consider establishing some kind of watchdog organization that keeps tabs on the patent office and is ready to present evidence of prior work when it becomes necessary.
If we watch these things more closely, maybe some of these ludicrous patents won't get this far.
It sounds like software patents have nothing to do with whether what is being patented is really original or not. It sounds like it is based on who gets to the patent office first.
Of course, if you don't believe in software patents (e.g., CVS), you get the shaft.
At some point, shouldn't this kind of thing get to be unenforcable?
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who know binary, and those who do not.
I happen to like Interwoven's Teamsite product which is all run through a browser and has some neat features. Very cool product, and best of all it runs under Solaris, not NT. Unfortunately, no Linux support yet - but I think they're working on that.
But true content management and workflow support are things that neither CVS, Zope, or wiki have. Slow down Slashdot.
Zope's very own Portal Toolkit (PTK) adds workflow processes.
Check it out here.
I can see it now. There can be a dedicated watchdog that would chack that site regularly and post whenever something ludicrous appears there. Then all slashdotters would go and swamp the site with outraged messages the PTO would find it difficult to plead ignorance then.
Ñ'
You can find it by going to the USPTO search by patent number, selecting patent number search and entering 5,443,036.
As in humans, life span is the maximum, more or less, time the body can survive. 120 years is the high end (maybe some French?). Life expectancy, however, is based on, well, talk to those that work with actuarials, they'll tell you. But in short, if you're born today, your life expectancy might be 73 years (say), though if you're already 73 your life expectancy may well be 92. However, the life span itself doesn't change that way. But then, what to journalists really know about anything deeper than the night?
Only if the number of keywords supported is in the patent. But yes, it should be easy to get around... Though adding functionality per. se. is not enough. You need to either remove some functionality, or replace some function with a (preferably better) alternative that isn't described in the patent.
They need to hire a few tech people to review tech patents.
IIRC a major part of the problem is the the USPO is funded in such a way as to encourage passing patents. Thus leading to a situation of pass by default.
My past employer decided to get out of network reselling and into vertical-market software, and developed a web-publishing product. I became responsible for supporting this and liasing with customers, yet I'd not seen it until moving departments.
My software had been sold as a web-publishing intranet aid to around 4 organisations. The main selling point was that anyone could publish data, and all documents would be converted into HTML from whatever format they were currently in.
It was nothing more that a commercial web-server (Lotus Domino in this case - arrggghhh!) together with some custom code and a few 3rd party document conversion libraries.
It sucked. I hated it. It failed. I just hope that this fails as badly.
Basically they are claiming a patent for a content management system, a la Vignette, Broadvision, Allair Spectra and a host of others. So many companies are clamoring to get into this space (including MS with their weak Site Server product) that I think it's safe to say that it's obvious.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
First off, I'm sorry for not reading all of the /. posts on this article, but THIS JUST PISSES ME OFF!
Whatever happened to the 'common practice' clause adhered to by the US Patent Office? They screwed Arthur C. Clark out of an extremely lucrative patent. I don't remember any of the dates, but here are the details:
Arthur C. Clark applied to the U.S. Patent Office for a patent on geostationary orbit. The patent office rejected the application on the basis of infeasibility(or was it impracticality?). Within a few years, the first geostationary satellites went up, and Clark again applied for the patent. This time, the application was rejected on the basis of 'common practice.'
I'm sorry to add to the simple sheer in opinions, but I'm certain that other people can see where I'm getting at.
If I understand the application correctly, 'common practice' is just a buzz term essentially meaning that a patent described by the application already exists, but that it's held by the public. (or humanity...whichever you like.)
For online publishing, 'common practice' is certainly existant, whether or not only specific companies have developed the technology beforehand. For Clark, he was the only developer to apply for the patent at the time when the system he described was not in use.
To put it simply, there's something majorly screwed up...
What's this Submit thingy do?
Does it have to be?
Yes, as a matter of fact it does.
If so, then 2.5E8 Americans could each individually develop the same solution, use it only in the privacy of their own homes, then get sued when the last guy patents it...
This was true until a recent change in the U.S. patent law. (How about that, government does something right for a change.) With the change, well, they can still get sued (anyone can sue anyone for anything) but the patent holder won't win.
However, that applies only to people who came up with it before the patent. If two people independently come up with the same invention, and the latter inventor patents it, then the first inventor can keep doing it, but the patent holder can still stop anyone else from doing it.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Sheesh, where the fsck did you get that idea? It's just plain wrong. And what idiot moderators modded this up as informative?
Don't take my word for it; look it up here.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
The sad thing is that the US thinks this is such a Good Idea(tm) that it's trying to force this absurd concept on the rest of the world.
On the contrary, the U.S. is set to begin publishing patent applications next year. They're not "trying to force this absurd concept on the rest of the world."
There is an exception that if the inventor signs a disclaimer that he's going to file for a patent only in the U.S., he can prevent publication of the application. But if he later changes his mind and files in a foreign country, the application will then be published.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Even more amusing, IMHO, is a patent it lists in its references:
Browser having automatic URL generation
Lotus Notes has been doing the online authoring/reviewing/publishing thing since at least version 3 (1993?). Lotus web-enabled the Notes product 'round about 1995. Technically, it didn't ship as a fully functional web publishing application, but as a template that required about 5 minutes of programming to use. Still, it seems that it would be publicly available prior art...
I think that for the foreseeable future we will be treated to at least one patent article per week. Many people will post, most posts will contain the text IANAL but.
Clearly there are many geeks interested in the effect of patents patentability. slashdot is doing a good job of exposing the dangers and the ignorance, but I fear no progress is being made toward a solution. We need more patent saavy geeks.
To that end, I request that slashdot retain a patent lawyer to write commentary on the slashdot patent articles. Perhaps consider it a tutorial on the state of patent law built from real world examples as they develop.
I think it would be best to pick a mainstream practicing lawyer rather than an academic or reformer. I think the perspective of the day to day legal realities would serve best.
To that end, lets consider this comment a petition and all those in favor reply to this article with a subject of AYE.
Where do you draw the line between public and private? It sounds like this company is doing something for the general public, or at least a specialized sector of the general public. At least, it's more "public" than, say, a manufacturing process strictly for internal use at a factory.
--
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
This sounds a lot like software for creating virtual communities, which we have just learned are a myth.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
This has its bad points and good points, but the important thing is that unless we break the law, we can't get copies of patents before they're granted. So even if an absurd patent is filed, only the Monkeys working for the USPTO have access to it before it's granted. If they're not smart enough (or diligent enough, which is the real case) to accurately assess the patent, then it goes through uncontested.
The sad thing is that the US thinks this is such a Good Idea(tm) that it's trying to force this absurd concept on the rest of the world.
Currently, U.S. patent applications are not published (unlike the rest of the world). This is set to change next year.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
And where do you propose we find someone who is an expert in computer software, and electronics, and electrical systems, and mechanics, and biotech, and chemistry, and materials science, etc., etc.?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Not currently for US applications. This is set to change next year, however.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
A quick search over at the USPTO didn't turn up any patents with "eMedicine" in them. So, how can we know what they really patented? Maybe they came up with a nifty compression algorithm that they use in their "GPS" and that's the thing that's patented. Who knows?
Quote from the search page:
Oh, go on, check out my job.
Well?
AYE
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
There's a local startup in Fremont, Center of the Universe, located in Seattle, called Westside.com and they're working on something like this too and have been for a number of years.
I can't say more, I did some user testing for them.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
On another note I have also seen a tool developed originally by Cnet called PRISM which is now sold as storyserver, which has some of this functionality. This is more like a combination of this and cvs.
Obvious "to one of ordinary skill in the art", but of course not to a lawyer........
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Let's hope that the patent itself isn't as vague as the description is. Stuff like Napster and Gnutella could be swallowed up by this.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Back before we all locked our boxes down, people often used cvs to place web pages and other item into a site.
This was done, for some parts, of HotWired back in the day.
I'm sure that some places are still doing that using CVS over SSH.
This should be an easy one to beat if there is even a need to beat it.
How will they deffend their patent vs peeople who have been doing the same thing for longer than their patent has been around?
These things make me sick, but I'm glad that Slashdot posts them. Some bad news needs to be looked into.
Be seeing you.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Actually, I'd like to know if the patent system fulfills any of its original stated purpose by protecting inventors from idea theft. Don't most inventors work for these companies anyway?
I do not have a signature
Thanks for posting a URL to the patent. I have some technical concerns with security (such as cleartext passwords for everyone being available to the security administrator), and the claims do not appear to be very original. I suspect there are a number of equivalent packages available. I think we should remember that the PTO is funded by user fees, so it will tend to err on the side of credulity in assessing patent applications. I have heard there are some US patents for perpetual motion machines and other impossibilities. Unlike the Swiss patent office, we don't hire Einsteins.
Content Management+Editorial+Workflow+Publishing? Newspaper editorial systems do this already; for example, the DewarView system from Harris, which is a prepress system that uses a database to manage versions of documents created using a MS Word-based editing environment for publishing. Other pre-press systems, I can't recall which at this point (but there are dozens of them), have builtin workflow managment systems. This is nothing new. Seriously, take a good look at products on the exposition floor being demoed at any major publishing conference, such as NEXPO (newspapers), etc, and you will see tons of vendors selling this sort of stuff.
Prior art is just that. Whether or not it's done in-house or not is irrelavent to the issue of whether or not someone came up with it before they did. Prior art does not imply public or private use- it only implies that was implemented in some manner at one point in time. Patents are concerned with who came up with the idea first. If someone came up with it first and can prove it, it invalidates the whole thing. That's why I snail-mail myself any invention ideas that I come up with nowadays and never open the envelope- because it proves when I came up with the idea and provides proof of prior art.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
WebSite Director has been doing sterling service in the web authoring domain for years now. In fact, the 13 December 1999 issue of PC Week had a playoff between different packages of this genre.
:v)
How some ***** can come along and patent the concept without thoroughly researching prior art like this is downright incredible. Can they be done for incompetence or fraud or something?
Vik
TeamSite actually runs on both NT and Solaris. I work at Interwoven, and I've been thinking a Linux port of the TeamSite server would be pretty neat. I haven't actually asked any of the engineers about it, though. I do know of a few companies that use linux for the client.
[insert witty quote here]
[d.v]: Hey there. I was reading up on your patent, and was wondering how you could claim that this was new and unique.
[PR]: Very simple. We have the patent. Ha ha ha.
[d.v]: But it is not an idea which is non-obvious and is built on other content-revision-control systems. So how could you file for a patent.
[PR]: (After he pops me in the head a few times) We have the patent, moron. Ha ha ha!
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
They have gone on record numerous times as being unsure about some of these patents but unable to research prior art properly due to lack of funding.
In which case they should be rejecting pantents, maybe at random, mayve every application in a specific area.
This isn't just an editor, it's got a spell checker and font choices.
This isn't just a phone, it's got a speaker on it.
This isn't just a dubwaiter, it's got a door and a fog horn on it.
Hey, is there an IP lawyer in the house? What's the actual answer to this?
"The ability to hyperlink to the text of a statute does not make one a legal scholar."- Anon.
How does the IU Knowledge Base work?
"allows all production to take place on the Internet. The system allows authoring and editing within the GPS environment or through word-processing programs like Word."
If it's all on the web it can't use Word. If it uses Word or any other editor, then it's not all on the web. Dennis Miller needs to put a rant on the patent office.
In addition, my firm uses a nice little web based product called LiveLink that allows authors to collaborate on documents. More interesting, it supports MS Office documents quite well (it understands the file formats) and can even translate a Word doc file into HTML for web based viewing.
Again, this is just another redundant post that says "What a stupid fscking patent on something that is already out there". I need to patent Slash before someone else does.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Your facts may be more then a little off. When patents first started being granted, there were far fewer. The head of the patent office could review each one personally. This is obviously impossible today.
I do not think that you would find anywhere near the volume of patents being generated in Edison's time... not counting Edison, who was patent happy even by modern standards.
Could anyone clear me up/correct me?
They should send the pending patents to established institutions/experts for peer review, and just act as the "editorial office" either granting or denying the patent based on the referees' comments.
Looks to me like this could be a valid patent. It isn't just CVS; it includes built in editing and communication facilities, plus it's a publishing system, which makes it sound like it covers more than CVS.
What, you mean like Lotus Notes?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
your prior art was not out for use by the public
Does it have to be? If so, then 2.5E8 Americans could each individually develop the same solution, use it only in the privacy of their own homes, then get sued when the last guy patents it...
Just a few patents down they describe "autocomplete" by microsoft merely distibuted over a network ? Maybe I'll patent the "idea" of a network on mars so my children's children can one day live in the lavish luxury of suedom. http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US06088700__
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Patents are a good thing!!! They are one of the catalysts of innovation. However, we are dealing with a relatively new "liquid" medium (the internet)in this day and age...where ideas flow so easily and frequently that patents almost hinder innovation. A new hybrid of the patent should be concocted for the internet by the internet.
Open a version-controlled file in GNU emacs, hit C-x C-q to edit it, edit it, then hit C-x C-q again to check it in.
-rozzin.
At other newspapers, intranets handle everything from archives to graphic information--and now, editorial systems. The advantage? By doing these things with a standard Internet browser and protocols, everyone can share information despite all the varied software and platforms found in a typical media company.
This is not an entirely new concept. In a paper presented in April at the Seventh World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Vlad Ionesco, then a researcher with KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, reported on a Swedish daily that has operated since June 1997 on an intranet-based production system.
The intranet for the 67,000-circulation, two-edition, six-day newspaper manages everything from tracking the work of individual compositors and designers to page scheduling. The system accepts messages from QuarkXPress about page status (through a QuarkXTension) and from other production equipment. Written in Java, a language that can run on almost any computer, it also enables variety of production reports.
Isn't this a bit like crying over spilt milk?
Maybe wikiwikiweb or CVS should have applied for the patent then !
Oh, I forgot, that's not very Open Source is it.
Enough is enough. The madness must end. We need to organize a letter writing campaign with one aim in mind:
Make Slashdot stop posting stupid patent stories.
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Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...
Here's the Patent
The frightful thing is that many other softwares already use this similar method. I remember using NetObjects Fusion Authoring Server to do pretty much what this patent does.
Also, this is another old news story. Emedicine announced this back in early August on their site, from the news postings.
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
How about we get some press coverage of these patents BEFORE they're granted. It would be alot easier to do something.
Can we get someone with clue on the damn patent board, already? I propose Taco.
You should have read the patent, this system can create documents editable by multiple people all at once which contain audio, video and text data.. SGML can do all of that, they ahve 24 VERY vague claism about what htis patent covers, its so huge and sweeping its hard to say what the hell they are patenting.
:P
anyways patents like this are of questionable validity.. netscape has some freaky patents on just typing in something like "www.aol.com" and it ifguring out the protocl and opening the page.. and thats patented!!
Jeremy
You do know that you can edit out all the patent stories in your preferences, right? So you don't have to see them anymore and stuff?
If you won't accept the word of someone who claims to be a patent attorney on their website, why would you accept the word of someone who claims to be a patent attorney on /.?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Rather than whinging about it too late we should be shouting prior art and wotnot before they get as far as being granted the patent.
The company I currently work for has been doing this almost EXACT thing for over 15 years. We're a medical publication company that uses SGML to format our books. Authors login from all over the world to our mainframe and use a variety of console-based and web-based tools to create, edit, manage and version-control publications. We have a lot of custom code binding commercial products together to do this. Also, I know we're not the only company in the same industry that does this sort of publishing this way, let alone other non-medical publishers. This is a horribly absurd patent. Obviously nothing in the way of verification of uniqueness of this request was done.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
I also work at Interwoven, and from talking to a few other people I've gathered that the official line is, "If there's a sufficient demand, we'll do it." The thing is, even though the Teamsite server has to run on Solaris or NT (including Win2k) the web server can run on just about any server OS; that includes the development webserver which can sit on a different computer than the Teamsite server.
Additionally, most of Interwoven's customers are Big Business, namely companies which run pretty heterogenuous computing environments (from what I've seen), meaning that of those who are running webservers on 'other' OSes, such as Linux, they will always have at least some Solaris or NT boxes 'lying around'. This adds up to very little demand from customers for other ports thus far. At least that's the way I interpret the situation.
I would love to have a Linux port myself since only Sparc Solaris is supported meaning I have to run the NT version on my Laptop -- No offense to NT fans, I just prefer to work in a unix-like environment; and yes I'm aware of Cygwin, but *sigh* it's just not the same.
Everything in this post is my personal opinion and does not represent an official position from Interwoven.
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
You are right, but those products definatly would limit the scope of the above patent. Adding workflow to an existing set of availble technologies may still be patentable under the US system, but would crop the patent down to size.
Personally I don't beleive putting a secritary, filing cabinate, and workflow system on the internet is unique. Any patent that relies soley on the fact that they are doing something obvious with internet technology does not make it unique.
... publish patent applications on Slashdot. This will get a lot of stupid patents out of the gene pool ;-)
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
We already have such an organization. They are called the US Patent and Trademark Office. They have gone on record numerous times as being unsure about some of these patents but unable to research prior art properly due to lack of funding. The lack of funding also has the effect of driving all but the dullest and least adventurous into the private sector; many of those who leave get jobs as IP attorneys.
The result: a class of talented IP attorneys with an unholy knowledge of the inner workings of the patent office. These attorneys are not necessarily concerned with the enforceability of the patents they secure for their clients. In fact, their interests are best served if they can get a large number of questionable patents, creating work for themselves (and their college buddies) in IP litigation.
As with a lot of things, you get what you pay for. The government is not committed to spending enough on the USPTO to ensure that they can hire quality people to do quality work. On the other side of the equation, investors *know* that the only thing valuable in a tech company is the IP, so companies generally make lots of money available for the hiring of IP lawyers and the filing of potentially dubious patents. The outcome easy to predict.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
But how many bothers to read this far down nowadays...
I read the cat exercise one ages ago, it's part of the obscure patent gallery...it's not news. Though it is funny.
Going on means going far
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
...IMHO is more of a business process patent.
That doesn't make it right, though. How different, really, is their ``patentable'' process from, say, a product from Oracle that allow people to work on purchase orders which then go through several levels of authorization before being receiving a final approval? Hell, there was a plan to use a commercial product that implemented this particular process that was being considered for purchase in the late 1980's when I worked at Ohio U.
I have to believe that there have been software packages that have done this before and have been around for years. Ask Boeing how they did all their maintenance manuals. I doubt that there was one or two people sitting in a cubicle cranking out 747 maintenance manuals. This is the sort of thing that the heavy users of SGML have been up to for some time now. What ever happened to Datalogics (well, these guys got bought out by someone; I forget who) and companies like that who sold publishing software? They ought to be able shoot quite a few prior art holes in this patent.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I'm not sure even that is safe, for some combination of the following reasons:
There's no shortage of companies that would be willing to steal an idea from an abstract, block the patent with bogus claims of prior art, and then outmuscle the inventor in the marketplace. The endless counterclaims would make the patent process even more cumbersome, making it even more difficult for the patent office to keep up. The net result would be that patents would fail to protect inventors - in fact it would make them even more vulnerable to various forms of predation - and nobody would bother filing for patents at all. Everything would end up being protected as trade secrets instead, meaning that they'd never be disclosed, and I don't think that would be a good thing.
I don't think abstracts should be made completely public. However, I think patents are important enough to justify a different solution: the patent office should, like a court, be able to subpoena experts within a technology area to comment on the potential validity of a patent. Obviously, some safeguards would have to exist:
If examining patents were considered a civic duty for experts in a field, just like jury duty is for all citizens, I think that would be a big improvement. It would have the same effect as drastically increasing the number of patent officers, but without the cost. Obviously there would still be a lot of legal wrangling going on, but I believe it would be a lot less than currently.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I'd say that one is patently stupid. If anyone actually tried to sell such a cat exerciser, don't buy it, not just out of protest, but because as with most things, cats become bored of this light trick pretty fast.
Maybe Gore or Bush should be quizzed on this sort of thing tonight. "This patent was awarded, how do you feel about that and would you work to change the way the US Patent office works?"
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The whole software patent issue tends to give me the attitude 'bite me I'll do what I want'.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
They need to hire a few tech people to review tech patents. Patents can be a good thing, as they are supposed to inspire others to make something better so they don't have to pay royalties to that other guy. They are also there to keep that other guy from stealing your work. However, when they are used to bully people, that is just not good.
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Herald: Hear, Sir Thomas Edison has achieved a patent on his newest variation on the light bulb.
Local inventor: So, he just tries another gas in the sucker and claims it as a new product? Oh, man.
Inventor #2: This is as bad as that Franklin fellow claiming to have discovered 'electricity'. Bloody lightning's been around since time began, and he claims no prior art...
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OK, so my historical facts are a bit off, but remember: history is written by the winners...
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and it's called slash. I think some of you may have heard of it before. :-)
Seriously, slash is very similar to the system they described and it would be mondo prior art.
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Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Of course, it seems a silly idea to patent collaborative software like that. If you want to get around it, I'd suggest adding or removing functionality. Varying the number of keywords supported should be just as valid as varying the number of clicks required to buy.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
...and I will show you someone that has not done enough research.
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Or GeoCities, or any other website that allows you to publish via a web brower.
Next thing to be patented is a system to store information dynamicly in something called a "table".
Wow. I wonder how 'a beam of invisible light' becomes visible when it hits something...
People need to start getting a clue: this kind of software is a _service_ not a commodity, and even with an investment in expensive collaborative environments, you're still going to need the services. So why not start with Free Software, and then get the services?
Frankly, sometimes I wonder why people keep creating these collaboritve environments, community servers, whatever you want to call them.
And then to claim they're revolutionary in any way.... that's a travesty. They all do pretty much the same thing: you create forms, which have data that go into databases or files (with perhaps some processing along the way), and then, the appropriate data comes out on some other page.
Most of this stuff can be done by a small team of good programmers in a few months. The abstraction is largely for the clueless... but many of the clueless won't figure out how to use the abstraction anyway, and many can also just hire a small team of good programmers.
Case in point: Broadvision, and my employer. My employer is HUGE. Big enough to have scads of programmers -- and some of them are essentially sitting around doing nothing. But rather than asking these programmers to implement some forms that non-tech employees could fill out to develop web pages, they went out and got courted by Broadvision and bought a whole package from them for who knows how much and sent the _managers_ and other non-technical folks off for training in it. With 2-3 months of PHP or PERL and Database work and I could have duplicated the functionality they wanted. Instead, they spent 2-3 months training half a dozen people (from my dept. alone) who probably still don't get it. And the funny thing is, Broadvision will probably get ongoing consulting fees (I guess this is why people produce software).
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I hate to be the one to say this, but if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, did it make a sound?
how is someone going to prove something like this or disprove it if the prior art that you've stated was never seen by anyone outside of that limited sphere of your company and it's authors?
Again, if you thought it was such a great idea, maybe they should have patented it.
So now that the idea is out, disprove it with your claim of prior art. Show that your app has been around for 15 yrs and disprove the patent.
Word of warning tho. I had a little dog a while back. Jazz-mine. Man she was a Georgeous little bull terrier.
While mucking around with a lazer pointer. I noticed that she liked to chase the dot. Often to the point of trying to attack it. Verry soon after however she developed a thing for shadows. Chasing them incessantly. Throw the ball... dog chases it's shadow. She never stopped and it soon got Mondo anoying having a dog snapping and barking at anyone or anythings shadow.
Believe it or not, the Vet suggested that the dog had a doggy version of Obsessive compulsive disorder and promptly put the dog on Prozac
It worked, although the dog never really seemed the same until onday a car cleaned her up.
I kinda blame the lazer pointer games for triggering this.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
sabotage patents:
- Send yourself an open, empty envelope
- Receive it. It is stamped with the date "Oct. 10th, 2000"
- Wait for 2~3 years
- Select a recently granted patent you want to nuke
- Copy the patent (like for school reports: try make it not look like a copy)
- Put copy in envelope
- Seal envelope
- Take envelope to judge
Wow, prior art...I code, therefore I am.
The head of the patent office could review each one personally. This is obviously impossible today.
No it isn't.
Indeed, I think you may have hit on a possible solution to the absurdly patent-happy frenzy we are seeing. Require the head of the US Patent Office to personally review and critique any patent application before it is granted. Disallow any and all deligation of this task.
That might, just might, reduce the explosion of patents sufficiently to allow our high-tech economy to survive another few years.
I guarantee, if something isn't done about this absurdity real soon now, we are going to have the dubious distinction of having watched first hand while the IP lawyers flush our most promising industry down the drain.
But then, maybe that is what the politicians want: technological progress slowed to a crawl so they can keep up, and keep lining their pockets with our hard work.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Patent laws were made to make people open up their inventions to the world. It would make no sense to allow a closed invention to be prior art.
- Steeltoe
A law is not just a law, it's an attempt at a solution to a well-known problem.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
What costs money is financing the time a person has to spent to communicate with the patents office, and, in Europe, the worst fees are for creating valid translations( but for open source, filing in one language should be enough ).
Why Open Source doesn't patent is because they usually don't intend to sue.
If Open Source intended to do this, just a few patents on the right spot would be enough.
How about an Open Patents project which requires licensees to assign patents based on Open Patents to Open Patents Projects ?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
that it is completely unclear from the claim list what exactly is patented as new.
Is it the RCS-style document locking ?
Doing this over this internet ?
Assigning an author and reviewers ?
Basically this is like patenting your recipe for potato-peppermint-with-the-odd-vegetable-thrown-in -soup.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
People on slashdot are always bringing up prior art, as if that completely invalidates a patent.
Here's a (very) basic example:
Someone back in the dark ages patents a 4 legged stool.
Someone comes along later and adds a back to it. The second person can get a patent on it, even though it's only a stool with a back.
The patent doesn't give them the right to make a chair, it just allows them the ability to not let others make that same chair. The second company would have to first aquire the rights to the stool in order to make the chair. (this is why patents are refered to as a "negative right")
Admitedly, if the first company had been adding backs to their stools and just never patented it, THAT prior art would invalidate the patent.
It's also possible, given the first patent, that someone 'skilled in the art' would have thought adding a back would be obvious, and the patent examiner shouldn't have granted it in the first place.
That's one place where the internet patent idea fails, because those 'skilled in the art' are off making dot-com bucks instead of examining patents....
My main point here is that patents that add a novel twist to an existing idea are just as valid as those built on completely novel ideas. Just because it looks like something you've seen before, you can't just write it off.
Keep in mind you've seen a lot of stools.
(I know there's a patents=stool joke in here somewhere, but i'll leave that to the trolls)
Well, I have no doubt that there is prior art here, but I don't think this is anything like Zope, wikiweb, and certainly not like CVS.
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"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
I have submitted a patent on stupid patents. I am hoping to collect royalties from all these idots.
I'm sorry, but mailing yourself something can be useful in case of a copyright issue, but not for patents. I someone copies word-for-word something you wrote, then showing the envelope *proves* that you were the first to write that and that the only way the other guy got that word-for-word is by copying your work.
It doesn't work the same for patents, since many people can come up with the same idea at once, without copying each other. When two companies work on the same idea at the same time, the one that gets the patent is the first one to submit, not the first one who started working on it (even if they can prove it).
Publications however, can be considered as prior art, and that's why IBM (I think) publishes a journal just for ideas they don't want to patent, so that others can't patent either. If auto-mailing worked, they wouldn't bother publishing that.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Perhaps one of the candidates will pledge to shut down the USPTO until such time as they get a clue...
Isn't there a period of time when people can complain about patent applications? Isn't that info available or is nobody just reading it? Why aren't these kind of things aroused before they are granted a patent status?
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Slash, cvs, wiki and such are similar, but check out MatrixOne. As far as I can tell it's a framework being used by lots of people to implement *exactly* that kind of system.