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CMGI, Altavista Patent Indexing, Searching
Aggrazel
passes along
a FinancialTimes.com story
that would send chills down my spine if I weren't already jaded and bored by such patent nonsense. You mean suits at a
megacorp
are taking advantage of absurd U.S. intellectual property laws to stifle innovation, quash competition, and steal candy from hard-working programmers? I'm shocked, shocked!
Here's the InternetWorld interview:
"...virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents. Q. Does that mean you'll pursue that? A. Yes, we will. Coming up in the first quarter of 2001."
Could someone please find out what patents CMGI owns?
And in related news, DeadSea notes that the search engine that powers the ODP
(dmoz.org)
has been
released,
under the
MPL.
It's rough around the edges; go thou and smooth it out. While you still can.
If the USPTO uses indexes to search for patents etc.
They should be the first to be sued.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
I have patented "a method of bringing about legal action, in the form of lawsuits or otherwise, for the enforcement of patent law and recouping damages due to patent infringement." You can't sue without violating my patent. I have also patented "A method of protecting the ideas and inventions of a person or corporation for a limited time so as to encourage them to make said idea or invention available ot the public." By having patents, you have violated my patent.
Though that was sarcasm, I wonder if (in this day and age) I could couch the patent in enough lnaguage to secure patents on patents and patent lawsuits.
Um, basically, we just suck.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Better yet, start writing to AltaVista's advertisers and tell them you're boycotting them because they advertise with AltaVista. Explain why. Explain that everyone on Slashdot (with X page views per day, blah blah) knows that AltaVista is evil, and probably isn't too happy with their advertisers.
Watch AltaVista's advertising dry up. Laugh. Watch them stop with this patent nonsense.
You can't just wait until everyone in the world is using your stuff and suddenly spring on them and claim they all owe you money.
They're doing the exact same thing Unisys did. But doesn't Unisys have a patent on "submarine" patents?
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Someone has patented crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
As seen here on Jerry Pournelle's website (when he moves this week to his archives, this will be here, but that will not be for a week or so. (sorry, but the original story is available only via pay archives at Michigan Live, unless someone finds the original news service)
Last summer, the folks at Albie's Foods here started making crust-free peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for their customers. Just before Christmas, a executive with an Ohio food company ordered Albie's to bag 'em.
Robert V. Vickers wrote to Albie's explaining that his company, Menusaver Inc., holds the patent for crustless PBJ and plans to preserve its exclusive rights to the lunchtime staple. Now, Albie's has asked U.S. District Court in Bay City to resolve the legal jam.
Albie's, a food manufacturer and restaurant, is best known for its tasty pasties, with stores in Gaylord and Grayling. Company officials say they hope the federal sandwich case can be resolved in a jiffy.
In December 1999, the Orrville, Ohio,-based food company Menusaver obtained the patent for the "sealed crustless sandwich." The product is the invention of Len C. Kirtchman of Fergus Falls, Minn., and David Geske of Fargo, N.D., according to the patent on file with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.
"The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings therebetween," states Patent No. 6,004,596.
Creamy or crunchy? Strawberry or grape? The patent doesn't get that specific. But:
"The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly," the patent declares. "The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly and into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter."
Albie's co-owner Regan Quaal, contacted by The Times, said he would prefer to smooth out the controversy privately and not spread it around in the press.
United States Patent 6,004,596 Sealed crustless sandwich Abstract A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings therebetween. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.
Inventors: Kretchman; Len C. (Fergus Falls, MN); Geske; David (Fargo, ND) Assignee: Menusaver, Inc. (Orrville, OH) Filed: December 8, 1997
U.S. Patent Documents 3083651 3690898 3767823 3769035 3862344 4382768 5853778
Other References "50 Great Sandwiches", Carole Handslip, pp. 81-84,86,95, 1994.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
At least we know that the inventor of the internet is currently unemployed, so he should be available as an expert witness to establish prior art.
What's a sig?
Could you tell me what I'll need to do to keep them from indexing my site?
The AltaVista spider identifies itself as Scooter, so HTTP_USER_AGENT will contain Scooter. If you're using Apache with mod_rewrite, something like the following should work:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Scooter
RewriteRule . / [F]
Which will return a Forbidden page for every request.
no, you could claim prior art, but _only_ if it was the _same_method_. geez people, they're not patenting the _act_ of indexing, they're patenting their method!
can't we create a "patent FAQ" and avoid this stupidity every time?
This is going to be fun. The best part is that Altavistat is not a "big bully" compared to the other search engine companies. They are all in the same "weight class" which means this patent is going to have to stand up in court on it's merits.
:).
:)
Those "merits include prior art in the form of Yahoo. One of the most likely targets
It will only get sillyer anyway. Right now a Jamaican politician has a patent on "Electronic Voting". So any country that uses computers to conduct an election will owe him money. To make that politically acceptable he set up a trust that won't give him any of the money personally but will support charitable causes. Apparently serious windfalls are expected
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
US5970497: Method for indexing duplicate records of information of a database
US6138113: Method for identifying near duplicate pages in a hyperlinked database
US6021409: Method for parsing, indexing and searching world-wide-web pages
US6128690: System for remote memory allocation in a computer having a verification table contains information identifying remote computers which are authorized to allocate memory in said computer
More can be found at Delphion's Intellectual Property Network.
--
If I had a buisness that was once a leader in it's field, and suddenly I was faced with the prospect of going out of buisness, I would be sorely tempted to beat people about the head with IP to keep from putting all my employees on the street.
However, it seems like there's lots of prior art. (See : A History of Search Engines) So this is probably just a corporate form of rigor mortis. Besides, doesn't everyone use Google these days?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
It will be interesting to see how they try to persue this. Will they go the route that BT is trying to do with their patent on hyperlinks, in this case, suing a small but important player, someone that they can probably match in legal fees so they have a test basis for further cases? In addition, suing a small player will be downplayed in the media, and thus few people would get a bad outlook on BT; if BT then won, they can take on bigger players, using their previous victory with the right media spin saying "Hey, just protecting our interests". Quite possible, but the question is which of the search engines out there would CMGI sue? If they tried to hit Yahoo or Google, they'd get a black eye really fast from the media world, so I suspect it will be something like HotBot or a minor search player.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
You don't "pay copyrights" for patents. In fact, patents have nothing to do with copyrights, not in the US and not in Britain.
If the Financial Times "legal correspondent" can't keep the difference between patents and copyrights straight, how accurate can the rest of the reporting be?
In a capitalitst society it's expected that anyone in business will pull as much underhanded and down right shitty stunts as possible to win. Business is war and war is ugly. I don't blame Amazon or Altavista or this despair asshole for trying. I can think less of them personally but I must stand up for their right to be stupid as hell.... it's the American way.
The problem is the patent office. If the American tax payers could force the patent office to foot the bill for all the legal fees resulting from a trivial or down right stupid patent, then Amazon and Altavista would never have gotten these silly patents issued in the first place and everyone would be much happier.
Laws were made to be challenged to the extreme, let's pass a better better law and stop all this sutpidity.
Wasn't Lycos around way before Altavista anyway? I remember back in the time off Trumpet Winsock seeing Lycos's page say 400,000 pages indexed! and being amazed. I don't remember Altavista being a twinkle in anyone's eye back then. If they were then why didn't they have altavista.com from the git-go? My $.02
G
Mr. Whetherell tells us so himself: He warned the company would defend its patent rights "if necessary . . . to the letter of the law.", which tells us that questions of ethical behavior or technological innovation presumably don't matter as long as there is still a legal loophole to be pursued.
The greed that has surrounded the whole VC industry over the last few years has caused people to lose fortunes, stalled important research by drawing away good people, discouraged long-term investment in research by stable companies, and made it nearly impossible to share and build on each other's research results, both in computer science and in biotechnology.
What can you do about it? There are some ideas that probably do need to get funded in a VC environment, and there are some far-out ideas that probably are well suited to that kind of funding. But for the most part, it's probably better not to do business with VCs, not to solicit funding from them, and not to work for startups. Not much good can come of companies that are fueled mostly by greed and irrational expectations. If you have a good idea, you can almost certainly find many other ways of financing it and building a business around it.
Thanks for admitting the duplicate story at least. (at Altavista's Planned Patent Lawsuits by CmdrTaco on Wed January 17, 11:34 AM CDT ). Why does this seem to happen so often? Editor overload (not enough cooks), duplication of efforts (too many cooks), interface problems with viewing the submissions queue (it was a only a week-old story), or what?
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
MacNN mentioned this patent being granted to some company nobody has heard of that supposedly covers using OS-level software to write CDs and DVDs...in other words, some of the very things Apple introduced a couple of weeks ago. D'oh!
--
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
How can something like this be patented? I mean, it's essentially a _slight_ variation on how any simple _handwritten_ list works.
You make a list. You check it. Twice.
Shit, Santa's got prior art on this.
-k.
Altavista figures it owns some useful technology and wants to assert it across the world. Fine. Glorious. Let them try.
But before we start marching, let's just remember that what they say they own isn't the same as what they own. Until you see the patent asserted, and consider deeply its claims, you simply don't know how bad (or how silly) all this is. Particularly in the case of web portals, where there are fierce competitors, I wouldn't be too troubled -- these guys can (and will) take care of themselves. They have portfolios too, BTW, and will be quite content to assert those as counterclaims.
The turn of the millenium has had a few sea changes for patent owners, not terribly well-covered in the media. In late December, the Federal Circuit's opinion in Festo virtually turned upside-down the strength of patents where any claim was amended, directly or indirectly. Virtually every existing patent, but particularly every existing software patent, has involved some substantial prosecution history changes. This change in the scope of the so-called "Doctrine of Equivalents" will dramatically impact upon the already narrow scope given to patent claims by the Federal Courts.
Moreover, don't forget that the more nuts the claim, the more likely it is invalid. The less nuts the claim, the less likely it has been infringed. Its a difficult process to drive the patent truck through that tunnel between enforceability and validity, and in so doing, you will discover that the patent system is fairly effectively self-healing.
The combination of Festo and these other factors suggests to me that it isn't time to take up arms. Let's wait and see what patents they wish to assert, and against whom.
My guess, no one anywhere is filing any patent claims that aren't slam-dunks in the first quarter 2001, we're all waiting to see if the Supreme Court takes up Festo again.
The recent stockholders meeting was a little tense, however, with little old ladies ready to wring Dave Wetherell's neck!
Problem is scenerio when you start banning adds:
Okay we don't like altavista, no adds from altavista allowed on banner now.
Hmmm and intel have been pretty dodgy lately, no adds from them either.
And you know I never liked black people and I think too many banner adds have them...
Lets just not go down the road, if the people read this story and all dislike altavista now they'll make it their own choice to ignore the add.
It's turtles all the way down.
I know that he's a troll, but there are many others, including those moderators that gave him karma points, that believe the posting he stole was his own.
Oh, I really like your anti-spam page. Keep up the good fight!
I do, and I thank you!
Here's some things you could implement by chaging you apache configuration or by including a bit of code in you CGIs/PHP stuff:
1) Block/Redirect by referer. That way, if you've already been indexed, you can redirect Altavista users to a page explaining Altavista's infamies and directing them to a more ethical search engine. Additionally, if you have legal firepower, you could let Altavista know that you know they're indexing your site and that you charge to let you site be indexed.
2) Please see the children of this comment for suggestions about robots.txt and blocking/redirecting by User Agent (Altavista's is called Scooter).
I think there is a Webmaster's guild somewhere. Also, perhaps the w3c could weigh in.
--
Tweet, tweet.
Search engine technology was well established before these patents where filed. I remember using Lycos in '95 or '96.
I don't remember the first time I used a search engine, but I suspect it was in the autumn of 1993.
IIRC, the search engine I used, was either the WWW Worm or WebCrawler (most likely the former at first, see below), and AltaVista came a while later as a "revolutionizing" new thing from DEC, partially to promote their Alpha 21164 processors (launched in 1995).
Search Engine Watch seems to agree with some of what I remember; AltaVista opening in December 1995 and WebCrawler in April 1994.
That's about where you get when it comes to prior art; the WWW wasn't much before 1993, and DEC most certainly wasn't the first player in the open. Proving prior art to most of the claims should be relatively easy, unless the patents are so specific that they only cover the things that AltaVista did and nobody else had done before (I don't quite see how that happened, the clue about AltaVista was that it was fast).
Archie (for those of you who weren't working on the Internet before 1995 :-) was a distributed data gathering and indexing system for anonymous FTP sites. Having taking a cursory read through CMGI's press releases & patents, I can tell you that most of that stuff followed the prior art of myself and the rest of the Archie team, from Archie versions 1 through 3.
If you want any background on this, feel free to contact me.
Alan Emtage (aemtage@mediapolis.com)
In cases like these boycotting just makes it worse. They're already hurting so they're trying to find new revenue streams. Cut off their legitimate revenue even more and they will only get more desperate and tenacious over their precious patents which might be worth something if enough people who can make money lisence them. They aren't going to just quietly fade into the night for lack of your ad money but will go kicking and screaming, destroying and litigating as much as they can in the process.
I cannot face going through the turgid legal ramblings again to find the links again BUT the simple fact is that the international treaties on patents specifically do not extend the recognition for "methods et al" which would not be patentable in the other nation... So international treaties say the search engines go non-US. Now any particular country could choose to extend their system and recognise the unpatentable patents so you just gotta make sure you don't move there.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I urge all moderators to moderate quincyq down. He is nothing but a thieving plagiarist who takes credit for the research, thoughts, and writings of others.
Who, exactly, is being wronged in this ethical travesty? Since banner ad contracts generally get worked out before stories get written, would you prefer that Slashdot not write stories that piss off their advertisers? Or should Slashdot refuse to run the ad, letting CMGi keep the money to be spent on placing it in a better-targeted location?
When all's said and done, it's CMGi who winds up getting the bad end of the deal, because they paid for poor ad placement.
my userid is lower than jamie's, so i think i deserve to be an editor now.
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
...of my patent application involving
Consider youselves warned.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Sack all the guys at the patent office and use it as a kindergarden....perhaps patents will have some sense then ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The front page that came up when I opened Netscape (/. is my start page) had this story on it, the banner was to download a eval copy of, yes you guessed it, the Altavista search engine. Jamie maybe you (or Rob, or Hemos) could explain to us why you seem to be willing to sell ad space to evil corps? Do you or Andover really have no control over it. Now if you look at my history you will see that I love and defend you guys and I'm hoping this is a oversight that will be fixed. I'm asking a honest question please give me a fair answer. At the moment I think it is ironic and you all will fix it. Pleae prove me right.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
``Does your search engine move as fast as your business? Click here to download a FREE trial version. AltaVista search engine 3.0''.
How ironic.
I wonder, can still use grep or do I have to pay some asshole who lives off the backs of others?
That's enough to build some talking points:
And you know the entertaining part? If the "indexing patent" turns out to be effective in court, search engines are liable to move web sites to offshore locations (Seahaven? :-)) where the offending patents do not apply.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I wonder what AltaVista's improvements over prior indexing tools are, though. "Your Honor, our system has one key feature never before proposed in an indexing system for distributed data--namely, humongousness. Of lesser importance, but still significant, are our introduction of Searchliciousness and The Wow! Factor."
So, do you feel bad about it, or are you flattered that somebody will actually hunt down your posts to gain karma?
It's going to be interesting to see if the court will uphold patenting "-what the Internet is-", when it was developed with public tax dollars.
Actually, Wetherell is saying the internet is a distributed set of databases, which I personally don't agree with myself.
-- iCEBaLM
I hope that all of the moderators see fit to moderate quincyq down. He is a low-life plagiarist who takes credit for the research, thoughts, and writings of others.
Soon, and very soon, the Internet will render itself useless, when traffic exceeds its capacity and or speed requirements abandon it. At this point CMGI and all the other patent grubbers will realize their technicalities will render their patents useless. You see all of their patents will be for the "Internet," and won't apply to any new technologies. Technically speaking, that is.
----------------------
Still, I would like to watch this pursued, because:
-
If they sue for patent infringement and get shot down, it will be a victory for the Internet. However, the notion of "Intellectual Property" not being absolutely ownable is going cast a cloud of uncertainty over many IP and internet related businesses. Ultimately, this could cause a downturn in the economy.
-
If they sue and win, we can all look forward to "owning" the "Next Big Thing". As coders, our salaries are directly related to the fact that someone can "own" an idea. We merely need to organize our efforts, patent the blatantly obvious, and bilk Corporate America - then we will see a change in patent law.
Either way, we can exploit this to our advantage.The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Jamie (or Rob or Hemos) could you please answer this question . Thanks you
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
This is a really popular question, I seem to get it every time I post a story that is in any way negative about a company that has ever advertised on Slashdot.
I really have no control over it. Let me explain this to you. Our editorial and writing staff are not influenced by, nor do we influence, our staff that buys banner ads. There is a total disconnect there. They can sell ads to whoever they want, I have -- let me say this again because apparently it's such an awe-inspiringly difficult concept that few people are able to comprehend it -- I have no control over whose ads appear on a story I post.
Brace for reality: most places consider this a good thing. You know, like, not having the ad for Famous Ray's Website appear on the page facing the flattering review of Famous Ray's Website?
Like, not having the marketing department staffers come sit down in my cubicle and say "we'd like you to review Famous Ray's Website, and we think they're really good, you'll probably agree with us, we hope."
I don't know those staffers. I don't want to know those staffers. They have never done that and it doesn't come up because we don't talk to each other.
While it is a little annoying to me that some companies whose policies I disagree with *cough* DoubleClick continue to put banner ads on our webpages, I will not try to influence ad sales, because then ad sales will come try to influence me. They leave me alone; I leave them alone.
Don't like it? Tough. Think that this is an "oversight" or that this makes Slashdot or myself somehow corrupt or stupid or evil? Please go away.
(Sorry. I'm in a bad mood. I just posted a story duplicate -- except for the dmoz.org search tool, that's cool and it's new, go download it and mess with it.)
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
This is all just noise from them anyway, they may be able to bully a few companies into paying royalties but if they go to trial they will probably lose. At least if these are the patents they're talking about, because they where all filed in 1998. Search engine technology was well established before these patents where filed. I remember using Lycos in '95 or '96. Even AltaVista was around before '98. So finding prior art should not be a problem.
If you think that maintaining a database the size of Altavista's is "basically just the same thing as a long handwritten list", then 1) it is very difficult to see how you could believe that anything at all might ever be patented and 2) you are in for a world of pain if you ever have to deal with one.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Why just settle for boycotting Alta-Vista... Why can't we block them from indexing our websites.
Is there a webmaster organization with enough members to confront Alta Vista and tell them that if they persist in this action that we will charge them for every webpage that they index?
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
No. You just have to have a record proving when you used the idea. If it was prior and more than 1 or 2 years old, all their lawsuit will do is to put it into the court records that the idea is public domain.
But do see if your lawyer will agree to pay himself out of the proceeds of a countersuit -- for harassment, filing frivolous suits, etc. Not that I care if your lawyer gets paid, but if he can take money away from these jerks...
Read up on robots.txt.
It's a file you can put in your web root that (well behaved) spiders look for.
You can use it to tell spiders not to index your whole site, or certain parts of it.
Normally good for keeping bots out of places they shouldn't be, but it can be used to ban bots.
Or, you could just drop any traffic coming from *.altavista.com...
--K
You are in need of a history lesson. Originally, the predominent PC compression format was the ARC format created by System Enhancement Associates (SEA). Phil Katz (PKWare) released PKARC, which created and manipulated ARC files. He was sued by SEA and, in a settlement, was allowed to release one last version with the ARC format which was called PKPAK. After that, PKWare had to develop its own format for future versions. This lawsuit turned out to be a horrible mistake on SEA's part. PKware placed their new ZIP format in the public domain, and BBS (Bulletin Board System) sysops and users touched off a massive boycott of the ARC format, killing it (and System Enhancement Associates) off.
You don't feel so smug anymore, do you?
they go bankrupt first?
sulli
RTFJ.
What a scumball!
This algorithm is based on the chinese fortune cookie amusement generation algorithm:
;)
1) Read fortune
2) Add the phrase "in bed" the end of the fortune.
Web patent generation algorithm:
1) Read previous patent
2) Add the phrase "on the web"
3) Mask in legalese
4) Apply for shiny new patent
(Note: This method is patent pending....
Another one of those. Pity you can't sue the companies applying for such patents for fraud. Ah well. Anyway, did you guys miss this story or did I just miss the /. posting of it?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?