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?

Comments

TELL THEM HOW YOU FEEL!

[fmaxwell]

Rather than just complain on here, I sent an e-mail off to Deidre Moore, CMGI's VP of Communications in the PR department. I told her(?) that if CMGI (Altavista's parent company) went forward with the lawsuits, I would boycott their search engine and their advertisers and would recommend that others do the same.

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.

Holy Goatsex, Batman!

[Bonker]

"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 original altavista

[weave]

The original Altavista search engine site was created mainly to 1) provide a useful service to the net and 2) showcase the power of the then-new Alpha processors running on Digital equipment.

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... :-(

Overcoming the problems with patents

[Morgaine]

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.