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Altavista's Planned Patent Lawsuits
caledon wrote in to tell us a story about AltaVista planning a bunch of lawsuits to enforce patents on things like Spidering and Indexing. In the article,
David Wetherell of CMGI says "If you index a distributed set of databases-what the Internet is-and even within intranets, corporations, that's one of the patents. We did a press release on this with a list of six or ten of the key areas that the patents cover." I guess patent lawsuits are their best corporate strategy since they no longer can make a good search engine.
There's a few other bits in there about CMGI, but who cares about CMGI?
These are not new (the three requirements you list, I mean--there are new rules, but those requirements have been there all along) so I wouldn't hold my breath for any great improvement in the quality of patent examinations due to these "new rules."
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
This is just classic. Didn't CompuServe or Unisys try to pull something like this with GIF? I know there are several other examples of companies doing this as a last gasp.
Look, let's be honest. The ONLY reason this is happening is because CMGI can't make a dime anymore. They are a failed business. That's why all of their dot boms are closing down. Their stock has tanked. So, how do they make money? Sue everyone under the sun for using "thier" technology. Yeah. Good luck.
And you wonder why CMGI is a regular on fuckedcompany.com.
Ah, good. Thanks for explaining that. But then I often see press releases that must be based on the (ridiculously over broad) abstract. Of course, one reason for these press releases is to attract investors, and the broader the claim the better, but isn't this skirting on fraud?
Yabbut the claims are too long for a Slash comment. Hence the link (ugly URL and all).
You could go get the claims yourself and summarize them for us, instead of just complaining about being ignored.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
By the way -- my experience in using A-V for searches indicates that any narrowly defined patents they have probably cover algorithms no one would want to imitate.
If you have to rely on AltaVista for people to find your site, you're already in trouble.
The problem is not all software patents are bad. There are some very good software patents that were very diserving (the recently expired RSA patent comes to mind). Although that patent was annoying to the open source security movement, that is not reason enough to make it a stupid patent. THe problem isn't allowing the patent office to grant these kinds of patents, the problem is the people passing these are the same people passing drug and industrial ones.
I find it funny that the first time I saw this article on the front page of dear old / ., that the accompanying banner add was for the Alta Vista search engine 3.0. It is funny how technologies break sometimes.
My university had a similar gaf. Some students were shot up at a local party by some unhappy gang members/thugs and the story was carried on the web page of the local Fox affiliate. Unfortunately, the banner ad (sporting the new university advertising slogan about being everything to everybody) was displayed above a headline that went something like One Killed, and 4 Injured in University Shooting.
Stuff like this will continue until technology and people get smarter. Come to think of it, this holds true for the software patent issue as well.
my .02
What concerns me most about this is the effect it could have on exellent free search engines programs like ht:://dig and swish.
Given that using one of the big search engines to index content or buying the egine for your own site has become a market niche, it isn't hard to imagine AVs next target being the elimination of free products using their <sarcasm>oh so unique and never before thought of search techniques</sarcasm>
And that is why everyone is up in arms on slashdot - because we want to keep it like this.
On the other hand, many search engines are disappearing anyway or taking their data from a single data source like altavista or inktomi.
Also, the simple application of database technology or a perl hash to create an index would hardly qualify as patentable.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Wow! What can you expect from a company that lists it's stock price on it's Home Page
Greed in the extreme. <Sarcasm>Gotta Love It.</Sarcasm>
Soo.. These are the ones responsible for making altavista go down the tubes in a hurry? I used to be an exclusive user of AltaVista, back when Digital had it. I slowly drifted from using it, as it became more of a lame portal than a decent search engine.
Now, I use Google exclusively. After hearing this, it makes me glad I do.
---
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
Why yes, banning the AltaVista spider will make their database so much less accurate than it is already. After all, AltaVista is the premier search engine on the web! The content is always up to date, and the accuracy of results returned is superb, and never affected by anything so crass as bushells of money!
Seriously, I'll doubtless do this, although I doubt AV will notice unless big sites start doing it. More to the point, patents can do you good - AV could survive as a patent holding company, with no actual products but a swag of lawyers. Look at Rambus.
Ve vere just following orders!
Seriously, the moral vacuum into which people persuade themselves they step in corporate life is an absurdity.
Well, isn't this the nature of enterprise itself? If you couldn't save time and resources using these services, then it wouldn't be profitable. These people are in it for pay, AHEM, JUST LIKE WE ALL ARE. People that provide unique services that are useful deserve it... after all you pay them (in one way or another) whether it is money or eyes on an ad, to be there and enjoy the effort of others. Besides, what is the true enforcement of all of this? This environment is a free-for-all, and if they lock down one little corner of it, one of you clever little bastards out there will find a whole new way to do it in say, about, THREE DAYS. And screw the lawyers.... Lawyers are a bunch of semi-smart (not truly intelligent) people that couldn't decide what they wanted to do in college, but knew that they wanted to be professionals. Don't ever fear those bastards. They will always be chasing coattails. To paraphrase Dune: "Those that can destroy it, control it." They can't even reformat it. F' those guys. They will never be at the front, never be competition. They haven't stopped a damn thing for a nanosecond on the net, haven't removed innovation for their own personal gain, HAVEN'T ACCOMPLISHED EVEN ONE MAJOR GOAL THAT THEIR NEFARIOUS BOSSES HAVE SET OUT FOR THEM TO TAKE FROM OTHERS. They haven't a chance to do any damage at all. All I ask is that you look into the idea of fair compensation. They want to rule the roost, jack customers and squash competition? Then they are really looking in to a streetfight they can't win, because they don't have the knowledge of even one of you brilliant little bastards. SO KEEP YOUR HEAD UP AND WIN.
Title: Method for Parsing, indexing and searching world-wide-web pages.
"Inventor": Burrows, Michael
Applicant: Digital Equipment Corp.
Filed: August 9, 1996
A system indexes Web pages of the Internet. The pages are stored in computers distributively connected to each other by a communications network. Each page has a unique URL (universal record locator). Some of the pages can include URL links to other pages. A communication interface connected to the Internet is used for fetching a batch of Web pages from the computers in accordance with the URLs and URL links. The URLs are determined by an automated Web browser connected to the communications interface. A parser sequentially partitions the batch of specified pages into indexable words where each word represents an indexable portion of information of a specific page, or the word represents an attribute of one or more portions of the specific page. The parser sequentially assigns locations to the words as they are parsed. The locations indicates the unique occurrences of the word in the Web. The output of the parser is stored in a memory as an index. The index includes one index entry for each unique word. Each index entry also includes one or more location entries indicating where the unique word occurs in the Web. A query module parses a query into terms and operators. The operators relate the terms. A search engine uses object-oriented stream readers to sequentially read location of specified index entries, the specified index entries correspond to the terms of a query. A display module presents qualified pages located by the search engine to users of the Web. Issued: Jan 26, 1999
Hmm. Hasn't Oracle, Sybase, and a host of others been indexing distributed databases since the mid-eighties? I seems to recall configuring clustered indexing on database clusters... Hmm. ;)
For that matter, NeXT's (now Apple's) Enterprise Object Framework (an OO->RDBMS mapping system) creates object caches of database contents, and these caches can span multiple databases on multiple machines, which fits the language.
Can you say "Prior Art?" I knew that you could...
i - This sig provided by
We are complaining about a patent on spidering because spidering is bloody obvious. It's a breadth first search - get a page, index it, and store the links in it at the end of the queue. Continue. It's first year CS stuff at best. Patenting this is absolutely ridiculous. That's why we complain.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
British Telecom (BT) believes they hold the patent on the Hyperlink (although filmed evidence from the sixties suggests they were not the first to discover this idea), but they're still trying to collect on it.
It's all stupid, greedy and wrong, but you gotta elect leaders and hold them accountable to cleaning this mess up and barring more of it from happening.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
suck it.
Although they already do I guess. Av used to be my se of choice. that is until they where portalized.
Oh well. I guess it was bound to happen.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
Since when did these guys own the patent on indexing a database? The soul reason they have a patent seems to be based on indexing a database that is stored in more than one location. How the hell can location make an idea unique enough to be granted a patent?
I could take every patent in existance, find some way of making it take place across a network, and I'd be granted a new patent.
I've stated in many times before. Just because something that used to take place on one machine, now takes place on a network doesn't mean it can be re-patented.
Please see my reply to your other comment. Compaw doesn't own Altavista, they used to.
I do have to agree with you about the hipocracy, it's the same type of thing as how we don't really get any "doubleclick are bad, mmmkay" stories since Slashdot started using them. Similar to the "web-bug" stories. All the stories are trolls, saying what the slashdot hordes want to hear to try and get the most eyes looking at banners to make more money for VA Linux. Well if their results are anything to go buy, we're going to see a lot more of it...
WTF are you talking about? Let's see, what do /.ers most love to hate about USPTO? Business method patents, software patents (both of those granted by courts, not by any direct action of the executive or congressional branches), and poor examinations (unrelated to alleged "unlimited power".)
I know a bit about the history of the USPTO (granted, not everything), so I'd be interested to know what you're talking about.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Alta Vista is never going public - I think Wetherell accepts this now, so he is looking for alternate revenues from this product. Look to see more suspicious revenue models from CMGI - most of their other incubated companies are dead or very near dead, and CMGI itself is in very serious trouble.
I meant compaq not compaw. Damn fingers.
This goes beyond mere stupid patents.
Holding companies like CGMI are the biggest failing of the free market economy in my opinion. Think for a second about what they are. A company that does nothing but make money by buying other companies. The produce nothing, create nothing, increase the value of nothing. They are nothing but money-sucking leeches in the very worst sense.
Unlike a company that actually produces something, it's almost impossible to boycott holding companies. If one of their companies doesn't get you, another one will; and the bigger they get, the harder they are to avoid.
These are the supermonopolies. The way things are going now, 90+% of the entire world's commerce will be between ten or fewer companies in a decade, and the actual consumers will be irrelevant.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The first Claim from that really is a troll:
I claim:
1. A system for indexing stored information, comprising: a processor configured to parse the stored information into indexable words, each indexable word representing a portion of the stored information [and (ii)] or an attribute of one or more portions of the stored information;
and
a memory configured to store index entries, each index entry including a word entry representing a unique one of the indexable words and one or more location entries, each of the one or more location entries indicating a respective location of the unique one of the indexable words within the stored information.
Again, I find it fascinating *spock eyebrow* how patents are issued by the patent office without giving a clue what part of the patent actually is considered the smart part.
Obviously, looking at the fact that they have about 40 pages, which is a lot even for a bloated patent application, they don't patent search engines, but an implementation with several features of it; unfortunately, it is completely unclear whether the patented thing is in the sum of all features, or whether reproducing just a single feature or even claim 1 would be a violation.
It seems that the whole purpose of the law in society is to set up laws so as to give people something to harry other people, regardless of reason. I guess that system works fine, because if people don't like something, they can sue, even if for a different reason. This system ws invented ages past: Just accusing someone of using Voodoo(TM) or Witchcraft(TM) against you and bringing him to a kind of court for that works too.
Of course, again slashdot is falling for a troll. This post should be up once Altavista is actually suing, not when the CEO is just boasting about the company. Imagine all those freaks blocking scooter on their routers for no reason.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I used to work for CMGI, and I know Dave
Wetherell personally. He's a bald-headed coot.
This patent idiocy is exactly the kind of crap
I expect from a person like him
--- even the safest course is fraught with peril
Doesn't sound logical, but law is not necessarily logical.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Will one e-mail convince them to back down? Probably not. But if enough people let them know how they feel, it might have some effect, even if that is just to limit how far they go with this ill-conceived idea.
For those so inclined, here is Ms. Moore's contact information:
PUBLIC RELATIONS
Deidre Moore
VP, Communications
dmoore@cmgi.com
Tel: 978.684.3655
Fax: 978.684.3814
Please be polite, businesslike, and civil in your communications to her. Threats, vulgarity, and rudeness would only detract from our messages.
However, they may have filed them in order to have bargaining chips in case other companies claimed infringement against other patents. That's not purely defensive, but it's still different from going out and sueing other people.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Perhaps you can express your displeasure by not letting them index your web site (robots.txt) and not using them for searches.
Two more words: "corporate goodwill." It's a balancing act, but goodwill goes on the balance sheet too.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Hum... I first heard this second-hand from the company attorneys at the Institute for Systems Biology, then saw it repeated in the news. However, a search of the USPTO database for, e.g., "DNA" and "pet food" mostly returned reasonable results (e.g. recombinant enzymes for degrading sugars in feed products).
Since I haven't been able to find such examples, I can only assume that either 1. the patents have been filed but not yet granted or 2. I've been trolled.
Seem to recall that amazon also have a great idea called "thumbnailed gallery".. A brand new revolutionary techonology/idea where big pictures are represented in a gallery with small sized pictures..
There are many ways to go about indexing websites without resorting to spiders, so there are other ways of supporting other search engines -- no one's going to be forced out of business by this one.
They seem to think they've got the whole field covered by their patents. Take this quote:
[Digital was] the first to spider and index the Web. And Digital did a good job of recognizing the potential value of that intellectual property. And they were very thorough in filing broad and deep and narrow patents. And we have another 30 patents that are in application. So we believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents.
Guess it might not matter if you use different methods if they have a broad enough patent.
Patents make companies look good on paper and feel good at heart.
Corporations with a heart? Bwahahahahaha! Good one!
To do otherwise is to cast an umbra on the very ideals of property that bind our society together.
Whatever. The right thing to do would be to kick the management of the PTO out of the building and put people with a freaking clue in their places. Then stop letting the PTO be a source of revenue for the government. In fact, it should be given its own funding to allow it to hire competent examiners at competitive wages. This is just for starters. There's a whole laundry list of reforms that the PTO is desperately in need of. Until we get them done, we'll always have to deal with these kinds of garbage patents.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Besides, the themes are pretty cute. I like Google's interface - Altavista's just too crowded. |)
I don't see how anyone could get an indexing related patent. Indexing has been around since before computers.
So by your logic, Eli Whitney should have been denied a patent for an invention which automated a manual process that already existed (removing cotton seeds)?
but even then I think the Romans, Greek, Egyptians, et. al. also had forms of indexing
They probably did. They also probably removed cotton seeds by hand.
I'm not saying the AltaVista patent (or software patents in general) should be valid, just that your argument is invalid.
---------
I take drugs seriously.
Okay, so now they have figured out that you can't sell everything they can think of on the internet.
So instead, they patent everything they can think of, and file lawsuits.
I have to go find some law firms I can invest in now...
CMGI at one point owned a fair portion of Lycos stock, but they never "owned" the company. As for "underperforming", at the time CMGI took stock in Lycos and Yahoo, both were doubling page views every month. How do you get "underperforming" out of that? And let me assure you that the yprovided absolutely no management guidance to Yahoo. They simply bought the stock when it was low and sold it when it was high.
"It won't be long before we (individually) can all be sued into a state of indenture for violating patents.." on our genes, which are being issued right now. How many (thousands of) patents are going through right now on gene sequences that *you* are currently using in your own genetic code? Bad lifeform!! Stop using that gene!
"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."
So, why not sue a few hapless competitors based on trivial patents? Perhaps this will somehow trick investors into thinking AV is doing something profitable and/or the perverse US legal system will actually *make* them profitable...
Ugh. Ever since Compaq started holding the reins of Altavista, they have become more megalomaniacal by the minute.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Don't they have to have a history of trying to protect their patent in order to have the right to "go after" offenders now?
Nope, you're confusing trademark law with patent law. Patents are routinely enforced in this manner. In fact, there is a type of patent known as a "submarine patent" which is much more devious than even this scheme. Basically the patent is kept pending for as long as possible through various legal tricks so that many companies begin infringing on it before they can even know it exists. Then when it finally passes it catches everyone completely by surprise when the patent owner starts suing everyone and their dogs. These have been largely eliminated now I believe due to new regulations that mandate that patents be revealed after 18 months (IIRC) regardless of whether they have been approved or not.
but I am truly angered that they wait for it to become common place before trying to enforce it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Actually it was smart, smart, smart of them to do in order to maximise their gains. It's just our patent laws and PTO management that are stupid, stupid, stupid.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Well,
let us look at it this way. I use Lexis.com all the time. It did not produce any of its content- the content there comes from state houses, law books and newspapers. It is a pay site (boy howdy is it) but I am happy to pay this because hundreds of people worked to construct the database- assembling the data and creating its indexing and search functions, which are better than Google even for first time accuracy.
AltaVista has a right to protect the work that it put into a unique indexing system and a unique set of research that cannot be replicated. I find it ironic that it is AltaVista doing this and not one of the better search engines, because the premier services would have a better case and a better chance of winning a legal battle for the patents.
I don't think patenting is the best way to protect this work, but there isn't currently a better way.
Goat sex free since 2001
Altavista wasn't the first search engine (unless it wasn't public for a few years). I remember using the World Wide Web Worm, and WebSpider back in 1994.
If the patent came out in 2000, in what year was it claimed? Surely those search engines are older?
I'm not clear on the technical details of the patents, but how do you patent something like indexing? Is the code patented, or is anything that indexes in violation. And this goes for the rest of their patents.
And how would they enforce these patents? And is the scope for their patents only for the web? the 'net? All media?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Some of the real brains are probably still working at the DEC...er..Compaq research labs!
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
I don't know which actually was developed first, but I used webcrawler long before I used altavista.
Add a useragent testing to your webpage. if it detects Altavista's "scooter", send it a message, "FSCK OFF, CMGI".
I believe that InfoSeek was actually the first commercially-produced Internet search engine..? I had a ``premiere'' account with them that cost about $10/mo. to buy access into their more detailed search database.
As far as I know, the only reason they stopped offering the premiere service was because of the newly-created free services such as AltaVista.
This was somewhere around 1994. I don't remember seeing AltaVista until 1995 or so.
At one time Altavista bought a tool that made a map of the "nodes" or whatever of a search and let you filter on the nodes to refine the search. This was really cool althought it was not perfect. Someone at Altavista soon realized that this map took up space that could be used for banner ads, so the whole feature was flushed down the toilet. Altavista could sue itself- they would be sure to win.
Damn I miss the old net, before the bean-counters and lawyers got involved... :-(
t ml
See ya in court.
http://www.despair.com/demotivators/frownonthis.h
Well, we've pretty much gone our separate ways. Last I heard, Louis was off at Kleiner-Perkins. Mike is still at SRC. Me? I punched out of AV and went to Zindigo a few months ago. Yes, I'm bummed about how things turned out, but The Show Goes On...
-=paulf
...-.-
I never claimed to be a "Tech Lawyer", or to have any background in legal reporting, which you no doubt do. Which is why I question your "(pathetic)" comment. I was just putting in my two cents, if you tried to write about music, I wouldn't put you down because you weren't wholly correct. You obviously have more experience with the law than I do, so lets keep the personal shot to a minimum, that's flame bait if you ask me.
--- What
Judging by the IP-related stories on slashdot over the last year or two, I'd say it sounds like "Serious, Life-and-liberty-and-profit threatening Trademark Infringement". :-)
(Hey, if "guinness-sucks" can be infringment, and "verizonreallysucks" can be infringement, certainly just adding one letter can be, too, to a highly-enough paid IP lawyer)
(Fortunately - in reality, I don't get the impression that ars technica is quite such a lawyer-happy bunch...)
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Now that it has been bought and sold by such pimps as Compaq and Remarq, it has become an Internet whore, and I weep for the wonderful individuals who poured their hearts into such a wonderful thing.
Now the corporate lawyers are attempting to wring something from nothing, to pay off the bills, which I can assume are pretty huge. It is so sad, an ignoble ending for something so worthy. Their old logo, snow-capped mountain peaks, seemed to beckon to purity and reach for a higher plane.
www.altavista.digital.com was cool
www.altavista.remarq.com is not
www.altavista.com is not
In a decent world, Compaq would spin off Digital, which would re-host Altavista, and the world would be good again. Yet I am jaded by reality; goodness is no longer a mitigating factor. The innocence of the Internet is dead.
Ishmal
It doesn't matter if Webcrawler indexed pages long before the patent was issued if they never described the technology in public. They could have been 100 years before the patent, but still would have to pay for license when the patent goes into action.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
When a company stops doing new stuff (have to avoid the deadly "innovation" word now probably trademarked by M$) and tries to make money on licencing old technology (which is what this is really about - they want make a few $$$ from companies that will just pay to make the lawyers go away) they have become the company of the living dead. Existing as a zombie they will crawl the net for a few more years, but will eventually decay into nothing.
"And they are controlled by money. If you have tons of money you can have any patent you want. Just slightly "improve" on a patent pending and they will give you the patent instead..."
Really? That has not been my experience in prosecuting 50+ patents through the patent office. Perhaps you would care to share your practice tips.
I love seeing a banner ad for altavista search engine 3.0, along with an article that notes that altavista can't make decent search engines anymore.
At least we know that Malda isn't letting advertisers control his opinions.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
Because I've written a couple spider like programs for our intranet and I'm a damn idiot!
Like someone else said it's like first year CS stuff.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Try http://www.ustpo.gov.
(Off the "AltaVista" topic, but still about IP...)
Unisys (I think) owned the patent and was going to try and charge for every GIF out there.
Specifically, I believe it was a patent on the compression algorithm used - technically, you can use GIF's without worrying about patent issues if you either have them uncompressed or use some other compression method. Problem there is that uncompressed GIF's are naturally huge, and I suspect it would take forever to get all the gif-reading programs (browsers, etc.) to implement the "alternate compression".
Of course, that's what .png's are for. If mng ever catches on (Mozilla/Netscape 6+ and Konqueror already support it, and I suspect if Gnome's browser doesn't already, it will very soon), we'll finally have a replacement for animated GIF's, too.
The big question on my mind, though, is: .GIF and animated .GIF, or can .PNG and .MNG catch on and take over anyway?
Unisys' patent runs out next year, as I recall. When it does, will everybody run back to
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for Evil.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
AltaVista probably gets all their traffic from portal types who sadly don't read Slashdot and don't care about obscure issues like IP patents or boycotts.
"Quick, Robin!" Batman said. "To the Batmobile. That nefarious fiend, our archnemisis, Google, is at it again."
"Holy Goatsex, Batman!" Batman's young charge exclaimed, quickly minimzing his browser window. "What dastardly deed is he up to this time?"
"Well, Robin. It seems that our old enemy is engaging in the dread business of Patent Infringment!"
"No!"
"Yes, Robin. It's a shame, but some criminals think that they can just employ what ever technology they want to without paying the rightful licensing fees to the patent holders, in this case a company that Commisioner Gordon has invested heavily in."
"Those monsters!" The boy wonder agreed.
Batman looked at Robin's computer monitor again. "Hey, that wasn't Batgirl's pornographic DivX site, was it, Boy Wonder."
"Uhh... Of course not, Batman!"
The caped crusader scowled at his young charge. "You are aware that the MPEG 4 technology used in the DivX codec violates a number of intellectual property patents and encourages the theft of big-name Hollywood Movies, aren't you?"
"Yes, Batman," Robin sighed.
"Take heart, Boy Wonder. Copyright Law isn't for us to understand. 'Ours is to do and die', after all."
"Okay, Batman! Let's get started."
"Do you want to slide down the long pole first, or shall I?"
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
We're planning to take all able-bodied persons in America to court in a precedent-setting reverse class-action suit.
patents R us
How old does AltaVista think they are that they were the first to do this, even if only applied to Internet technologies? I used the gopher and archie index searches before the World Wide Web existed.
Time to ipchain deny the dec.com spiders from sites if they want to play selfish games.
A few more ideas on the same theme:
Alternatively, instead of redirecting to a 404 page, you could sidetrack to a page explaining why you don't allow direct linking from AltaVista, this page being set to jump to the real page after a few seconds. Greedy companies are already planning to use similar schemes to push ads in our faces (`interstitials' I think they're calling it); turnabout is fair play in my book.
Exactly right.
Doesn't sound logical, but law is not necessarily logical.
Well put. Too often science/engineering/tech types try to understand law by divining the general principles, and extrapolating what the specific laws ought to be from those general principles. But while this approach works well in science, it does not apply to law.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
Its the second rule ("non-obvious to someone skilled in the art") that confuses me.
Given a task to "index the web" it seems very likely that just about any programmer would at least start with a spider type (or, as mentioned by other posters, a "breadth-first" search).
Is the fact that someone at AltaVista claims to have asked that question first enough to make the method used patentable?
This seems to be the question in a lot of "stupid patent" stories. Sometimes they get business practice patents -- like "one click shopping" -- and sometimes -- like this case -- they try for technology patents. In this case, at least, it seems like a business practice patent would have been more appropriate.
If (and I doubt this...) AltaVista were the first to think of the idea (maybe 1993 or so??) that the population would be interested in getting a indexed list of existing web pages then maybe they should have patented that idea not the obvious method for how to gather that index. Maybe they even deserved to be rewarded that patent due to the utility of having an index of web pages....
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Neato. Best way to cripple a search engine is to deny the spiders.
but has anything like this been done before? Like a unified boycott of a spider. What prevents them from changing the 'id string' to something like "spider.google.com"?
linuxLover
On the first I will wholeheartedly agree with you. As to the second, pray tell me how patent examiners are supposed to find this unpublished prior art? Perhaps you expect them to be clairvoyant, so they know that Frederick Q. Warzelheimer actually invented the very thing described in the patent 15 years ago, but kept it in his basement and never told anyone? (The privacy zealots here would have a fit!)
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
True enough. Maybe I should have said, greedy, greedy, greedy.
------------
Interested parties can contact C.U.N. Court's public relations manager at: Anita_Mandalay@CUNcourt.com
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.
What is patented here is the scheme of annotation of the index, not the idea of listing things in an index. Mr. Dewey Decimal might have patented his scheme if he had been smarter/greedier.
The basis for West Group patents is similar. West currently has a virtual monopoly on the print publication and indexing of positive law (case judgements, statutes, etc.), a monopoly it has extended to electronic publication and the WestLaw database. This form of legal reference is most useful for the research of precedent. Lexis/Nexis owns Shepard's Citations and Matthew-Bender, a large legal publisher. Lexis, with some overlap of WestLaw, indexes and databases treatises and forms which facilitate the development of contract language, the application of the law in a transactional or litigational context.
illegitimii non ingravare
I think i've seen this kind of thing before...
Companies with lots of patents and sagging revenues will often use lawsuits as a strategy to increase their own revenues with some court awarded damages and thin out the competition. Back in the early 1990s Texas Instruments set about on just such a strategy and failed miserably. At a point when memory prices were falling and japanese competition was heating up, they filed lawsuits against several Japanese chip manufacturers over their misuse of Jack Kilby's IC patents. In the end, TI lost their court cases and a lot of money in the process. (It was kinda ugly) So this kind of strategy is a gamble that doesn't always pay off.
I'm not sure how it will workout with internet companies like AltaVista. They may not have the funds to support a lengthy court case and the companies they are suing, probably can't afford to pay if they lose. Perhaps they're just hoping to scare some people into signing some modest licensing or partnership deals? (If war is just diplomacy by other means, are lawsuits just business deals by other means? hmmm...) Otherwise the courts may rule that, as with TI, these basic technologies are now entrenched and the patent holder simply waited too long to start trying to enfore them.
Absolutely... Does Taco even know who's paying his bills lately? Not that I would prefer him censoring material about advertisers, but I'm sure that silly little article will cost him a few thousand $$$.
"I've seen plays that were more exciting than this.
Honest to god... Plays!" Homer Simpson
Disallow: *
All the patented indexes in the world don't do doodly if there's nothing in your index...
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
A History of Search Engines
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
It is a very obvious technique, but the thing that pisses me off about these types of "lawsuites" (as law is a loose term to begin with the term lawsuites covers everything now from real law to Fluffy the poodle got a bad haircut and it depressed her type of cases) is that nobody sues until aboslutely everybody is using the technology.
Don't they have to have a history of trying to protect their patent in order to have the right to "go after" offenders now? There is no way in hell that these morons could have had their heads buried in the sand so far that they just now realized that other people are using this technique. I think the patenting technique is highly questionable. And the idea that a patent can stay good for so long when it comes to Internet ideas is just ludicrous.
Now, if the patent was for something truly novel and wonderful and amazing (in other words, non-obvious) instead of something that any group of morons with two computers and a database would dream up on a bad day, then I could see it. But a patent on something so bloody obvious that hasn't been enforced until it is completely common is just stupid.
I may have been annoyed if they went after the first few other search engines to use this technique, but I am truly angered that they wait for it to become common place before trying to enforce it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And the nice thing is that the patent office and the law are on the side of the stupid. Grrrr.
------------
Hypocrisy within hypocrisy within hypocrisy...
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I wonder how much revenue those slashdot-linux banners do bring in ?
I intend to email them to tell them I'm switching to google as a result of this. Dunno if it'll do any good but ifya don't try ... Anything better than webmaster@cmgi.com?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Um, these have been the three pillars of patentability since the 19th century. The 01/01 rules are updates to some of the details.
Have you read the claims of the patent, to determine what is claimed as the invention and may be enforced on others, and to determine if is really is "ridiculous" to one "in the field"? You likely know the state of science and legal reporting both (pathetic). Getting upset about patent scope based on some interview doesn't make any sense.
Good point. However Webcrawler was a project from the University of Washington which was very public about their aims and methods, as academia usually is.
wasn't there a 'veronica' that indexed (searched) gopher pages?
You're right, which is the sad part. Hopefully, with the decline of the NASDAQ and the .com regime, the government will be able to hire some semi competent technical advisors.
--- What
Altavista has been and is still my favorite search engine. Most of the other popular search engines just don't cut it. They can't seem to find the stuff I want. Yahoo appears simply be another altavista since the use altavista. While there are search engines out there that list a larger portion of the web in their database. That only seems to add clutter and when you are searching for a certain item, all the extra stuff just bogs you down. In my honest opinion. Altavista is still the best.
"Only Real Men Have FABs." -W. J. Sanders III
http://www.despair.com/frownonthis.html
so sue me.
I know it's NOT true, at least as stated. I was Verity's first Internet product manager and one of the first members of the W3C's advisory board, so I was in the thick of this. I clearly recall, without reference to any notes, that the first really broad indexing of the Web was by Open Text. We thought they were a bit crazy to claim that they'd even try... Verity had already developed a commercial spider, which shipped with our server, when Alta Vista was still developing theirs, I think. I clearly remember when "Scooter," which was how it identified itself, nailed my poor little Macintosh server one day. I called to complain and found out that someone who wasn't familiar with it was trying it out while the primary developer, Louis Monier, was away. I'm sure that Tim Bray, founder of Open Text, would have a clear recollection of the order of events. Nick
Nobody should be paying anybody for the rights to implement similar services on the Internet. What if Tim Berners-Lee started demanding money for using his invention - The web itself. What if Vinton Cerf started charging money for using all the things he invented - TCP/IP, etc?
We are the ones who built this world, these companies are here only by our leave, and they should certainly obey the traditions of our world or get back out of it. The rule of the Internet has always been "If you get something, give something else back". These CGMI type companies are just thinking they can rape and pillage with no thought of the long term effects.
I just added them to my robots.txt. Fuckheads.
From the article, referring to Archie in 1990:
Just substitute HTTP for FTP, and that sounds a whole lot like AltaVista's patent. Isn't this the exact kind of prior art needed to end their patent on spidering technology?
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
A large corporate conglomerate (Mitsubishi, Hyundai, R.J. Reynolds, Vivendi Universal, AOL-TimeWarner, etc.) is very different from a holding company. The conglomerates consolidate the management of their diverse corporate holdings in order to realize economies of scale, leverage brand status, create synergies, choose a buzzword. They do, in fact produce things. They are legally responsible for everything their subsidiaries do, say and produce, subject to the effectiveness of their schools of land sharks.
A holding company is another animal, typically created in order to provide a legal umbrella for a large transaction. For example, Joe Company's bottom line is sagging and they are taking a hit in the market cap. They are having a hard time marketing their stock and the board has decided to take the company private, that is, buy all outstanding public stock. This is an expensive proposition and will require borrowing a lot of money. They call Phil's Merchant Banking and ask to borrow $3 billion against their current assets and expected growth. Phil says sure, I want a piece of the action; but finds it inconvenient to be seen as a majority investor. Phil incorporates Flaccid Investments, Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Phil's Merchant Banking, to hold the assets (debt and/or equity) that Phil controls as a result of the transaction. Five years later, when Joe Company goes IPO at twice the market cap, Phil cashes out, folds Flaccid and goes to Bermuda.
Any number of holding companies can be run out of a discrete little office on the fourteenth floor. Like it or not, they do provide value or they wouldn't be done.
illegitimii non ingravare
THe problem isn't allowing the patent office to grant these kinds of patents, the problem is the people passing these are the same people passing drug and industrial ones.
Bunk! The USPTO examination staff is divided into hundreds of art groups and subgroups. To get to work in one of an art group, an examiner must have specialized training for those classifications of art areas examined by that group.
An index to the extensive USPTO classification system can be found here
While it was not always so (there was a time when USPTO did not have software examiners on staff), the PTO does, and has for some time, had software examiners who pass primarily and virtually exclusively on patent in that art area.
but which patent? Lots of hits for "dna" AND "pet food". So which one?
None of these holding companies has a single offering that the larger market is interested in. Outside of Alta Vista, CMGI doesn't have one product of interest. These holding companies are fading fast.
Stuggling .com companies all suing each other to try and stay afloat, but how can it save them?
Are they just going to keep suing each other and passing the same money around, while the lawyers skim off the top?
Or will they all go out like etoys, spending all the loot suing people that have no money, and then start going under?
The primary problem here is that until this Patent was awarded the competing search engines weren't aware of any patent issues.
Imagine writing a application (search engine), and have it available for a year or more - after which a patent is accepted that means you owe money for a license on the previously released product?
That means anyone who writes software or a web site is up for unlimited damages. Looking up patents to ensure you don't infringe one is hard enough - but now we have to worry about patents which cause your work to infringe retrospectivly.
One must wonder how 'unique' a patent is if between submitting a patent application, and having the patent awarded the idea is discovered by several other people.
I'm almost afraid to touch the keyboard :-)
Why? Logic dictates that no one could possibly have been using it before they filed for a patent, right?
Well, of course someone was, because they didn't actually make it up. What sucks is that any one who wants to prove different has to demonstrate this to invalidate the patent. If you can come up with a description of this phenomenon (ie, indexing or prior search engines, in this instancee) which was *published* before the patent was *filed*, then that counts as "existing in the prior art" and the patent is invalid.
That's the real problem, is that the patent clerks don't always know all the time just exactly how to check for something considered to be "prior art." The information has to be "out there" and the right people have to see it for ridiculous patents like this to be overturned.
--M.
CMGI has a legally enforceable duty to its shareholders to maximize its value, and to maintain and protect the value of its corporate assets. If they did not do so, they would be liable to their shareholders, both as a company and the directors individually. To expect a company not to pursue patent infringement claims is naive in the extreme.
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Hopefully, CMGI and their "@ventures" will collapse, and Bob Kraft will be left on his knees behind Governor Celluci, begging for more state funding since his largest corporate sponsor has dried up.
BTW, on an offtopic note, how does ArseTechnica sound as an Ars-spoof site?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
AFAIK, software cannot be patented in Europe. You can copyright code, but not patent the resulting program. The international nature of the internet thus limits the importance of these patents, since the spiders and search engines can be hooked up to the web anywhere in the world.
i love it! the top banner ad on the first page is for av's "new," "fast" search engine v3.0. And the first story is on bashing the sponsor! AAAHAHAHAHA!
A patent is only applicable in its issuing jurisdiction.
Someone should invent tiny pellet sized bombs that can level an entire building and walk into the patent office and sprinkle a few around... then walk out and KABOOM. No more rediculousness. The patent office doesn't protect patents. They hold us back from making great use of technology. And they are controlled by money. If you have tons of money you can have any patent you want. Just slightly "improve" on a patent pending and they will give you the patent instead... and while the original person was going to really use the invention... you just shelf it since it could be a threat to your money making practices. I really hate the patent idea. If they are going to do this then have an intelligent peer review process that doesn't award patents to people trying to patent the obvious but does give patents for free to those with brilliant ideas. STOP THE INSANITY. :) Ok thanks.
more coffee
IRNI
As I always say (to be roundly ignored on each of these threads) is that the _claims_ define the invention, not the abstract. You can't sue someone for practicing the abstract--only what's in the claims. And because you typically amend the claims and legally _cannot_ amend the abstract, the abstract is typically much, much broader than the claimed invention.
In the federal register 01/05/01 new 'rules' came out regarding the patent examination procedure and the way that examiners must determine utility. Utility is one of the big three you need to get a patent:
they are (1) The item is novel (2) the item is ' non-obvious to someone skilled in the art' and (3) it must posess "utility" -- or the designed must show it is useful.
BitLaw (http://www.bitlaw.com/) has some resources on patent law, but I'm still confused.
How long does it take for a patented architecture to be reimplemented by lots of competitors in order for it to be seen as a properly patented architecture? Some really good ideas languish for years before their full potential is realized, and so patenting those ideas often seems futile-- the patent will expire before it becomes worth anything. On the other hand, many really good ideas get copied immediately, in which case, patenting them must have been correct in hindsight.
There are almost as many spidering search engines out there as there, now, as there are web portals. Didn't altavista do it first? And if they did, then why are we complaining that they got it patented? There are many ways to go about indexing websites without resorting to spiders, so there are other ways of supporting other search engines -- no one's going to be forced out of business by this one.
Patents make companies look good on paper and feel good at heart. If you don't want altavista to own these patents, then the honest thing to do is to get enough capital together and buyout altavista (as well as google and others) and make one big search engine that you can run yourself and decide to manage exactly as you wish. To do otherwise is to cast an umbra on the very ideals of property that bind our society together.
Read the rest of this comment...
This is all going to come down to retaliation by the internet at large. Not linking to Alta Vista, and basically making Alta Vista and it's partners persona non-grata on the internet. They've basically been allowed patents on fundamental and non-original items that have been in use since the net started, and many have been in use since relational databases were first being used. Screw em, and screw anybody that sleeps with em.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Ha ha! I'm picturing a boardroom full of marketing guys talking each other into believing that one.
"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."
It's kinda hard to take this bit of news seriously when I'm staring at an ad for Altavista 3.0.. "fast and improved".. :)
~Marshall
-------------------
arcane for life
It's bad because it's math. Patenting math is bullshit because math is an inherent property of the universe - it's discovered, not invented.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
This is getting absolutely ridiculous. As if a coke-snorting ignoramus of a president wasn't enough, we also have to put up with the general incompetency of other major branches of the government. The problem with this "e-conomy" is that the current system of government does not understand the specifics of science and computing. Granted, if I handed the case to my mother she would most likely give out patents like this one (and Amazon.com's One-Click Shopping®), but the point is that both are ignorant towards how ridiculous this seems to someone in the field, and how it will change the market as a whole. I can only imagine what ludicrous restrictive patents were handed out in fields that I don't know much about....
--- What
Now some chump firm (CMGI CGMI CIGM whatever, who cares, there are too many acronyms in our world already...) bought it and acts like they invented it. I wonder where the real brains and team who created it all and made it happen are now?
Damn I miss the old net, before the bean-counters and lawyers got involved... :-(
CMGI is also a VC firm. They went out on a limb to fund my company... We were a new model in a new industry, but they saw the potential. One result: many geeks worked on cool pioneering stuff and made lots of money.
And speaking of search engines, long ago CMGI also bought the pioneering Lycos and took it public, making tons of money for still more geeks. They took an underperforming asset and polished it into something valuable, and geeks benefited.
I saw an interview with Moby once. He was talking about how he was once opposed to his songs being used in car commercials because they stood for everything he was against. He's not changed his stance ... and every dime he makes from his songs being used for products he's ethically opposed to, he donates back towards a cause that fights the existence of those products. So even if Compaq still owned AltaVista (which apparently they don't) the revenue generated from them displaying their banner on this site could serve the greater cause by informing the thousands of readers on this site about the negative impact that that company or other companies may have on the industry. I guess it's just another way of looking at it.
I find all these patent lawsuits amusing, such as BT's hyperlink patent. Can someone tell me if they only apply to USA or are the worldwide?
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
That makes me sick that he knows what he's up to and is proud of it. I could see if they came up with some really unique idea. But please a database with a web page interface for searching it. Like that hasn't been done a bazzillion times over.
Method for ranking documents in a hyperlinked environment using connectivity and selective content analysis
Abstract
In a computerized method, a set of documents is ranked according to their content and their connectivity by using topic distillation. The documents include links that connect the documents to each other, either directly, or indirectly. A graph is constructed in a memory of a computer system. In the graph, nodes represent the documents, and directed edges represent the links. Based on the number of links connecting the various nodes, a subset of documents is selected to form a topic. A second subset of the documents is chosen based on the number of directed edges connecting the nodes. Nodes in the second subset are compared with the topic to determine similarity to the topic, and a relevance weight is correspondingly assigned to each node. Nodes in the second subset having a relevance weight less than a predetermined threshold are pruned from the graph. The documents represented by the remaining nodes in the graph are ranked by connectivity based ranking scheme.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
OK, so they want to play an intellectual property game... How about me going over there and demand that they remove my intellectual property from their index? I mean, I got a bit of content out there, I bet they have copied it wholesale and added it to the index, without my permission, and that surely has to infringe on my copyright or something like that. Hell, I'll sue! ;-) If everybody had been playing the same games, the net wouldn't be useful for anybody.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
The situation reminds me of bullies at a playground. It used to be that all the kids would play there, but now the bullies want it for themselves. It elvolves into things like gangs, and the regular folks go away.
Unfortunately, I can't think of anything to make that seem funny
All these lawsuits remind me children fighting over something screaming "mine!", "mine!", "mine!". At it never was theirs in the first place. And they will all cry and blame the other guy when they break it.
Ubersoft seems less of a satire, and this sequence (about ten strips) in Sinfest seems strangely appropriate.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You make the comparison between AltaVista and Lexis inappropriately. It's certainly true that both AltaVista and Lexis survive through the content created by other people, but the two pursued completely different payment models.
AltaVista provides its services for free, while Lexis charges a premium. If AltaVista decided tomorrow to stop offering its services for free, and starting a subscription program, I'd support them completely - I wouldn't actually pay for the service, but I'd have no problem with their decision.
Lexis may be the gold standard in their field, but nothing (other than the usual price of going in against the heavies) prevents others from competing with them. The problem is that AltaVista believes that nobody should be competing with them in the searching/indexing game, at least without paying unspecified - but likely rapacious - licensing fees. David Wetherell of CMGI:
So, the patents are both broad and narrow (?). And virtually everyone who indexes the web is in violation of several.
I don't know if Digital was actually the first to develop these techniques. I don't know if the technology they use has actually been copied that closely, or the patents are sufficiently (read: ridiculously) broad enough to encompass what Google, HotBot, Lycos, and whatever all else is out there is doing. I do know that it's Bad News for the health of the Internet in general.
Damn I miss the old net, before the bean-counters and lawyers got involved... :-(
Don't worry, that time will come again once we all get so fed up with the current patent idiocy on the Internet that we decide to do something about it. There are a number of alternative solutions:
1. Shoot all patent lawyers. This would undoubtedly be the most satisfying solution (although many would object that it wouldn't be painful enough), but it's not practical simply because in unenlightened countries like ours it would be considered illegal. So scratch that.
2. Go through the political system and get the application of patent law to the Internet banned. This would require sentience on the part of politicians and justice on the part of the judiciary. So scratch that.
3. Create a new Internet cryptographically separated from the current one and available only to people that are not patent lawyers. Since patent lawyers could gain access to it only by deception, anything they say in court about patents in use on this new medium would be either inadmissable in court or else provably uninformed, so all patent action would fail.
Hmmm, damn, I guess there's only one way to go.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I can hardly wait!! When can we expect this new, faster, more accurate search tool? for years I've been using inadequate search engines that provide the most search points to the companies that pay the most. I'm ready for the future!!
Your kidding, Alta Vista says it's already in use? You mean this is another big company's idea of marketing. Placing rediculus patents on ideas.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
...to a country near you: Corporate Feudalism. Since Bush Sr. gave the U.S.P.T.O. unlimited power ten years ago, they've patented everything--notably things that possess these two qualities: universal dependence and lack of novelty. It won't be long before we (individually) can all be sued into a state of indenture for violating patents which should not have been issued in the first place.
It's so much sneakier than Orwell's 1984.
I'd rather be a unix freak than a freaky eunuch
Ewige Blumenkraft!
i shall patent it first, and then sue altavista
Finally, we know the true identity of the inventor of the Internet! It turns out to be AltaVista. After all, they patented that which "the Internet is."
Maybe this is another case that will come down to defining what "is" is...
On a more serious note, he also said: "They were the first to spider and index the Web."
Does anyone know if this is true? That seems unlikely that no one tried to index the Web before they did.
________________
________________
Private Essayist
Quoth Wetherell: "They happen to own 38 patents, many of which we think are fundamental in the search area. They were the first to spider and index the Web."
Well, I led what was approximately the *4th* attempt to spider and index the web, the Open Text Index (R.I.P.); efforts that I know of that predated us were WWWW, Lycos, and the original Infoseek.
There were a couple others that came along between our launch and the arrival of Altavista. Sheesh.
Lycos holds another vaporpatent on spidering, BTW. They were waaaaaaaaaaaay before Altavista, too.
I especially like this one: "Adding new entry to web page table upon receiving web page including link to another web page not having corresponding entry in web page table"
Come on, now. Unless this actually just protects a very specific method of following the link (so you can avoid infringement just by using any other method), it won't stand a court challenge even if the average IQ of judge and jury is 80.
Re:
So ``sort | uniq'' will be a patent violation?
(Well, I certainly hope there's more to it than that!)
What we need is a Proxmire-type (of ``Golden Fleece Award'' fame) senator to publicize these ridiculous patents. Perhaps when the general public starts finding these patents as ludicrous as we do, these corporations might start feeling embarassed (when people start laughing at them, Jay Leno makes jokes about silly patents on the Tonight Show, etc.) and positive things might start happening at the USPTO.
One can only hope...
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
The other company responded with a lawsuite against altavista using 10 patents in various parts of its operation.
The judge looked at the list.
"1- Part of altavista's server infrastructure violates the patent PN1292/382881.31A "Using processorr registers to implement a linked list""
Judge:"We must study this evidence. Ahh, what do we need"
Secretary general:"We need a kiddy to reverse engineer the code. This is very hard to be done and companies usually spend a lot of monay on that. Not to mention its not legal."
Judge:"We are the department of justice. People rely on us. I will reserve engineer this even if it is the last thing I do. We must find the truth"
Judge:"So what do we do now?"
Kiddy:"See all those numbers here paps? All these are machine instructions. There are 1000000 of them and we have to translate them to human instructions and then look for the offending code. I like the 100Mbps net connection though"
Judge:"We must find the truth. People rely on us"
Judge:"Hey wife. I learned a new thing today. Reserve engineering. You must look in 1000000 numbers to find the evidence. How exciting. We are spending $10000 and 10000 manhours on it but we have to find the truth. People rely on us you know".
Wife:"How exciting! The Simpsons are coming tonight for lunch. Mr Simpson was telling us the other day about the new thing he learned from the online help, mmm, how to include pictures in his emails or something. Now you will have something to tell him too."
Judge:"Yeah! We have some pretty impressive computers with big screens in the office now."
No wonder the department of justice likes patents...
..."Fucking Idiot?" That seems to cover the lot.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
I read the site, and it's awfully informative. Now, if there is documentation on paper as to what previous search engines did, then, that is a "prior art" case... in which case I think Altavista's gonna have difficulty collecting. However, that is all dependent on the targets of the lawsuits knowing enough to go for prior art and invalidating their lawsuit. It could also be possible that some choose to settle. I really hope for the former outcome. Of course, I am not a lawyer... yet.
yours,
yours,
kbs
I remember a specific guy, let's call him Dan K, who communicated in '93 that he was working on an unbelievable, revolutionary thing that will change the world, but he couldn't tell us what. It was obvious however, that Dan was virtually exploding from excitement.
The thing he was working on turned out to be the World Wide Web.
I'm impressed up to this day, by the brilliance and quality of some of the folks working for DEC at that time. And no! Bob Palmer was sure as hell not one of them.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
The link was missing WAIS and freeWAIS which were around before 1990. WAIS had advanced boolean searching features, making a mocky of the claim that altavista was the first with it. WAIS did not itself have a spider, but that had been added seperately in many implementations.
I am not even going to mention how lame these patents are because it would be redundant. Many of my friends work for CMGi companies and they always talk about how shitty it has become since Dave W got on board. Good luck guys.
-Kancer
Compaq ads? There have been some ads for Altavista running on Slashdot lately.
On a related note, GMGI is the majority owner of Altavista (not Compaq).