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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.
If you have to rely on AltaVista for people to find your site, you're already in trouble.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
Perhaps you can express your displeasure by not letting them index your web site (robots.txt) and not using them for searches.
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
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.
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...
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
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".
Yup. Unisys (I think) owned the patent and was going to try and charge for every GIF out there. Forced the creation of PNG- basically the same but without the proprietary algorithm.
Oh well.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
(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.
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"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!
Time to ipchain deny the dec.com spiders from sites if they want to play selfish games.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
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
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... :-(
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
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
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
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).