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!
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.
But, IANAL. For that matter, IANAPL. Hell, IANAKW, even.
{PL==>Patent Lawyuh; KW==>Karma Whore}
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-- Geof F. Morris
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
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.
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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...
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?
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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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Also, that(patent) pretty much defines what a Laboratory Information Management System _is_. (See my webpage for more info if you feel motivated.) The whole point is modeling the workflow so your content(published reports or peer-reviewed articles) meet your labs quality standards...
And yes, most LIMS do enforce content approval of some form or another. They also support an audit trail so you can see the most recent values of your results and all the changes that have occured in the past....
Granted, we are not talking about something that will do production management on your whole report... just the results of individual experiments. However, given how vague most patents are, I'm sure that a good lawyer could probably make a compelling case
Prior art... I submit the entire LIMS industry. :)
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RobK
Myddrin
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
[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.
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?
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...
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
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
While you're at it, cc: The patent office, although judging from some recent patents issued they may not be on the internet, let along be off quills and inkwells.
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
...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'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
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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.
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.
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
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...
1. are for ideas already implemented by other individuals
2. are trivial in concept.
To take an extreem example, consider using buttons on shirts. The idea is trivial and has already been implemented by other manufacturers. An application for patent of buttons should be rejected for these reasons. The same standard for physical inventions such as buttons should hold true for software patents as well.
Patent law, when applied properly, can benifit society, but instances such as Emedicene's patent does much more damage than good.
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.