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Author of Archie Challenges Alta Vista Patents
Hieronymous Cowherd writes: "The press release says most of it, but basically, Alan Emtage was surprised that CMGI was awarded patents on things he had already done. He's also willing to help those that get sued: 'Emtage has also put out an open letter to the programming community stating that he is happy to provide further information and assistance to anyone who is approached by CMGI in an effort to defend the patents in question.'" Talk about prior art -- as this release points out, "The first version of Archie released in 1989, with second and third releases in 1990 and 1993. Using FTP, a precursor to the HTTP protocol of the of the World Wide Web, Archie searched, or 'crawled,' public FTP sites, indexing their contents for easy access by Internet users. At its peak in 1995, there were over 30 Archie crawlers located around the world searching and cataloging millions of files."
Oh sure, fix the patent application process so it doesn't hurt so much when we get screwed. Lets call that the 'KY jelly' approach: it may not hurt as much, but you're still getting buggered.
No, respectfully, forget the KY jelly, it's better if the absurd patents keep getting granted to draw attention to the real issue: you can't own algorithms, they belong to God. The granting of patents on algorithms is the root evil that has to be eliminated, lets not try to sanitize it.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
The first example doesn't look for a string in a file; it looks for a string in the filenames that find returns.
The second example doesn't really do anything other than redirect ls's output to a file; grep never gets run on anything other than an empty standard input stream. For instance, try
and you'll see that the piped command is executed, but with no input. Which is why God gave us tee.So, yes, /. isn't a geeksite after all.
Why use xargs? This is just equivalent to backquotes, which do the job without invoking another program: (with . -print if your find is bitchy, without -s depending on your grep, etc.). But, of course, it's all about the rgrep.Interesting passage from your analysis.
:) BTW, not flaming, your post was interesting, but that's the funniest thing I've read all day.
"'Though I'm not a lawyer....' It is clear that Mr. Emtage is not a lawyer."
You just don't get analysis that cuts that deep on the TV news.
First Patent! Woohoo!
Drinking will help us plan!
Actually, I'm more convinced that they knew he wasn't dead and that the meeting to create the patent went along these lines:
... by a guy named Alan Emtage..."
... er, 'discover'?"
Johnson - "Well, sir, there actually is prior art. And he's not dead."
CEO - "What? He? Who?"
Johnson - "Well, there's this thing called Archie
CEO - "A guy? But there's no patent, right? And he's just one man, not a company, right?"
Johnson (shuffling through papers) - "Um, right on both accounts, sir."
CEO -"Then patent the fucking thing. If he yaps, we'll take it to court. We've got lots of money, he's got none. We'll litigate him to death. He can't afford it, he gives up, we get the benefits."
Johnson (sighing) - "Right again, sir."
CEO - "Now, any other unpatented ideas we can steal
Of course they have to be secret. Patents are ways to protect the idea you just came up with that no one knows about yet. If you tell everybody before you patent it, you've lost your new idea.
But you would by definition already have the patent on file. And filing date is what gets counted with patents, not approval date. If you file for a patent today and 100 people spring up selling 'your' idea tomorrow, you will be able to extort fees from all of them as soon as your patent is approved. The examiner won't consider a single thing published after your filing date.
This follows an alarming trend we've been seeing lately. Companies have been registering patents and/or copyrights on the most absurd things (remember Amazon.com's "one click shopping"?). The only way they'll stop trying to do these things is if people win lawsuits against them. While it's not easy to do so, if a non-profit organization is created for the specific purpose (or if there is one already, perhaps?) of filing (and winning) lawsuits against rediculous patents, we might have a chance at protecting our rights to use existing technology.
> I've been waiting for some of the 'Net pioneers to come out against this crap. Looks like Emtage is one of the few who has the resources to fight this!
"funny" will be if he has a patent on it and makes AV pay out the gazoo for using it.
"funnier" will be if he donates the proceeds from his patent to the EFF.
"funniest" will be if he turns out to have a patent on one-click shopping, too.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If there should be any blame placed it should be with the PTO, although Altavista (CMGI) should know better. It seems to me that the incredible incompetence of this organization to allow these sort of obvious prior art patents to go through is making a bunch of lawyers rich while at the same time causing all kinds of trouble for everyday users.
Lawyers really piss me off!
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billwashere
Fair enough. Now pick a patent claim which you claim to read on the prior art, and we're in business.
Wow, that was a flashback. [digs deep into some files in a forgotten directory] Yeah, I remember bookmarking a link about spiders, many years ago . . .
[from my almost forgotten lynx bookmarks file, which I used before I discovered graphical browsers:]
<li><a href="http://web.nexor.co.uk/mak/doc/robots/robots .html">World Wide Web Wanderers, Spiders and Robots</a>
A few other early web sites I used to frequent:
<li><a href="http://daneel.acns.nwu.edu:8082/index.html"& gt;Big Time Television Home
Page</a>b lic_html/bb/summary.html"> The Mother-of-all BBS
</a>s Femmes Femmes</a>
<li><a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/homes/mcbryan/pu
<li><a href="http://www.cnam.fr/bin.html/imageWWW">Femme
And for the doubtful:
bash-2.03$ ls -l lynx_bookmarks.html -rwxr--r-- 1 llywrch users 4493 Apr 1 1995 lynx_bookmarks.html
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I'd argue retrieving and analyzing mirrors lists goes a metadata step beyond just using links to more information in the index file (FTP index or index.html) a server sends a client (or in these cases a spider).
Some of the stuff the patent claims are supposed to do were probably prior-arted by the first person to "ls -Ral|grep 'fileIamlookingfor'" on a network drive, or at least by going another step beyond that to actually grepping the files. Not that this will apply to all of them, AltaVista's no doubt innovated.
IMHO, "I can patent it because I do X on a network of computers" smells as bad as "I can patent X because I moved X to a computer" in the first place. IANAL but logically these precedents and patents are going to end up worth whatever the results of obvious challenges are.
"Prior Art" depends not only on the existence of the "art", but on attempts to patent it.
Utter nonsense. The USPTO guide makes reference to examples of things that are non-patentable in a attempt to explain the obviousness and prior art standards. Examples used in a brochure from a few use back:
-You can't patent a new coffee cup handle, even if it's ergonmically designed. Coffee cup handles haven't been patented, nor has any sane person tried to patent them, but they still constitute prior art.
-You can't patent a widely used or distributed idea, regardless of whether the initial innovator asked for a patent. I can't patent the compiler because although the idea is pretty intriguing, it's in such wide use. The fact that the original innovator failed to apply for a patent has no effect.
You should read up a bit on patent law. Just because you did something first doesn't mean you can have a patent on it. In this case, the "invention" has been available far too long to be patentable. Sorry, but after a point the invention becomes common practice and common knowledge. By failing to file for the patent early on in a timely fashion, the inventor relinquishes the right to do so later.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Maybe this will start a trend. Big Corp. tries to patent important but universal method/solution, brilliant hacker says "step back, bitch", and pimp slaps them a few times.
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
When a company forgets to see if an original creator is dead before they try and steal their work. As of late, companies are either patenting things that are beyond stupid or things already done by other people, cept that most of the original creators are dead. Looks like CMGI made a slight mistake. Can you imaging the mood in the board room today.
CEO - "what! he's not dead? who the hell told me he was dead and that there was nothing to stop us?"
Johnson - "Umm, I did sir."
CEO - "Johnson, thats it, I wanted a piece of the easy money/stupid patant pie and you just blew it."
Johnson - " I take it I'm fired then sir?"
CEO - "No, I want you to go kill that guy first, then go and track down every signle geek that belongs to slashdot and kill them so that there will no longer be anyone that might know that this idea isn't original."
CEO - "Then kill yourself for being stupid."
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
Exchange protocol A for protocol B and derived work C for derived work D based on those respective protocols, and the *algorythm* is the same. To a decent computer scientist/programmer, that's basically "obvious". It "obviously" isn't to the USPTO, which I still believe to be the problem.
I'd like to consider myself a prety decent computer scientist and programmer (as well as a fairly hot patent lawyer). In my view, much depends upon what are A, B, C and D. The change in a single line might be seminal or trivial. As I keep saying , the devil is in the details.
So, what gives here? Several of the components in the "Preferred Embodiments" strike me as potentially worthy of patent protection, but the actual claims are pretty weak. Does the introductory material that comes before the claims have any weight?
Absolutely it does, but only in particular and limited ways. The specification defines the terms, and to the extent there is any question as to what the claims mean, the specification is the primary device for understanding it. The specification must also provide a written description of the claimed invention sufficient to enable a person of ordinary skill to practice it.
Finally, if the claims uses language in means+function or step+function form, then the claims are deemed to be limited to include the corresponding language to that function as set forth in the specifciation.
If you'd like to get more specific, let's take a particular claim.
Thanks.
It isn't that the prior art itself directly makes the patent invalid. It's that the Archie prior art makes idea obvious (and thereby indirectly invalid).
:-)
These words, I do not think that they mean what you think they mean.
The legal requirement of unobviousness in Section 103 of the patent act requires a substantially different analysis than what you are suggesting. It is never enough to say: Behold A, B is obvious.
Who is talking in the abstract? I have a good idea about what Archie and Veronica are, as well as what the CMGI patents cover. Mr. Emtage does as well. And so do many other people. If you don't, maybe you should look up this information before accusing others of "spitting in the wind".
We are discussing technical issues and issues of obviousness here: given that Veronica and Archie existed years before AltaVista, is there actually any innovation in AltaVista's claims? Should AltaVista's patents be valid in an equitable patent system that aims to encourage and reward innovation? And does that suggest possible challenges to AltaVista's patents based on obviousness?
Legal validity is a completely different questions. The legalistic points you make are true and clear to many people involved in the discussion. But they are irrelevant at this point. If you attempt to reduce every discussion of patents and prior art from the start to a point-by-point discussion of legal strategy, you are missing the point. That kind of approach makes a poor lawyer as well as a poor engineer. But, then, you seem to be mainly contributing to this discussion to push a particular agenda, not as either an engineer or a lawyer.
When you already have lots of people using A+B+C and then D comes along, then A+B+C+D is unworthy for a patent because it is obvious to practitioners in the field.
Of course not. There are zillions of cases to the contrary.
All depends upon A, B, C and D. The devil is in the details. Several patents issued on paper clip designs in the past few years, all of which dealt with what you would consider minutia, and all of which included the same basic elements. I have little doubt that they are valid and not rendered obvious on that analysis alone (although they may ultimately be invalid for more particular reasons.).
It seems to me that this underlies the most fundamental problem with how patents are used/granted: new patents can be granted that create only token differences from previous patents and/or prior art, while new ideas seem to infringe on previous patents even while they do add new features.
But it isn't the case. "Token" differences won't satisfy the unobviousness criteria, and new ideas, if indeed they are new, can't infringe an existing claim.
Did altavista buy that crawler to get the around the prior art issue, or would this be another piece of prior art?
I need to see if I still have the files around, but I'm afriad they might be gone. :(
A new idea, while patentable over prior art, can indeed infringe an existing claim. For example, imagine that the prior art is a patent on a chair, comprising a plurality of legs, a seat and a backrest.
Now, if you get this great idea that arcuate rockers affixed to the legs would make for a wonderful chair for grandparents, you can file a patent application for the rocking chair, comprising a seat, a backrest, a plurality of legs, and an arcuate rocker.
However, if your patent issued, this would not necessarily grant you the right to manufacture rocking chairs. It would permit you, however, to preclude anyone else from making, using or selling a rocking chair. If the chair patent were still in term, however, you would need a license to manufacture your own.
The usual scenario, unsurprisingly, is that cross-licenses are negotiated between the two patentees.
I think it is the earliest, being
around 1989, and before the web.
It operated before Berners-Lee web.
So it is patented.
Please correct me if I am wrong but are US patents enforcable outside the US?
Now, if the answer is yes, what would be the costs to bring cases against companies across the globe.
Would this be a practical mechanism to persue 'patent infringement'?
If no, then there is no problem. US money-grabbing Corps. will screw only themselves and their contrymen/women. And they can vote to change the mess.
The rest of the non-US based internet will carry on.
Compaq stock is up, and altavista was sold to CMGI not long after the aquisition of DIGITAL
Uh... not quite. AltaVista was divested from Compaq and sold to CMGi, the black hole of internet money. Don't blame Compaq (well, at least not for this).
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
If a court rules that Alan Emtage was the first to develop the methods described in CMGI's patents and CMGI's patents are canceled (or whatever the legal term for canceling a patent is), can Alan Emtage then get patents on the same methods and sue CMGI?
Maybe the patent office should create a site called SlashPatents, or something, whereby patent applications get submitted for revue by the general public, so that any prior art may be submitted, if there is any. That`s the theory, now to see if such a system would work out in reality.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The other point is the concept of "... the claim must be non-obvious to a practitioner of the field..." and THIS is where the archie defense has serious teeth. Whether that will hold in court I have no idea, but the patents such as CMGI have registered are ludicrous. Exchange protocol A for protocol B and derived work C for derived work D based on those respective protocols, and the *algorythm* is the same. To a decent computer scientist/programmer, that's basically "obvious". It "obviously" isn't to the USPTO, which I still believe to be the problem.
So as usual, the lawyers fight over the niggly points, and no one cares about the soundness, correctness or morality of the law and the process that spawned the conflict.
Once again, let me emphasize that it is simply pointless to speak about patents in the abstract. The abstract and general subject matter of the patent simply does not inform the question whether a patent is infringed or invalid. The bottom line is the specifics of the patent claims asserted and a particular apparatus or method usage alleged to infringe
Okay, I got down to brass tacks and read one of Altavista's patents. Specifically, I read all 44 pages of US6021409: Method for parsing, indexing and searching world-wide-web pages. I chose that one because the title and abstract look like something that should not be patentable.
What I found was very interesting.
The first 27 pages are a bunch of diagrams, mostly of data structures, with a few network and flow diagrams thrown in. Pages 28-42 are a detailed description of the problems involved in creating an index for a "database" as unbelievably massive as the web and a fairly detailed description of a complex set of data structures, encoding systems, compression systems and algorithms that solve the problem (all of which comes under the heading "Preferred Embodiments"). It's a hard problem and it seems to me that the details of a good solution are worthy of protection. Finally, beginning on the bottom of page 42 and continuing through page 44 there are a set of 33 claims.
Now, I understand that a key standard in the application of patent law is that the idea must not be obvious to a practitioner of the field. I'm not sure what standard the court would use as a practitioner of the field, but I guarantee you that the system described in pages 28-42 is not obvious to me or anyone I know (and I know some sharp people who've been in this business for a long, long time). I strongly doubt that Archie did any of the sophisticated things that the Altavista patent describes. If it did, then Emtage should have been shot for implementing a system that was massively more complex that necessary. Archie was a simple file name indexer and when it was big the net was small. Veronica had a little more need for some of the techniques, but again, the web is so *much* larger than gopher ever was that Veronica should have had no need for the levels of complexity described.
However, I've had some significant dealings with patent attorneys in the past, both from the patent application process and from the patent litigation process, and I concur with what werdna said: It's the claims that matter. Well, in Altavista's patent, after the excercise in computer science erudition displayed in the "Preferred Embodiments", the actual claims of the patent are generic, vague and broad.
So, what gives here? Several of the components in the "Preferred Embodiments" strike me as potentially worthy of patent protection, but the actual claims are pretty weak. Does the introductory material that comes before the claims have any weight?
At the end of my read, I'm not sure whether I think the patent is a worthy contribution to human knowledge or a complete crock of shit, because although there's some good stuff in it, I'm not sure that any of the good stuff counts.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The Prior Art Search Engine developers would have to get permission to use Altavista's "search engine" patent!
AFAIR Tim Berners-Lee described hyper-linking in his original proposal for the Internet. His proposal should be carefully reviewed by all claims candidates, including the Patent Office and Al Gore, with respect to all claims of invention with respect to the internet.
I recall reading Tim's proposal in some magazine -- don't recall for sure (CRS syndrome at work here), but I think it was published in Dr. Dobb's Journal (of Computer Calisthentics and Orthodontia - Running Light without Overbyte).
The REAL problem, however, is that in the dim, distant past (CRS notwithstanding), the Patent Office reviewed all applications so thoroughly that it took far too long for patents to be issued, so Congress changed the rules to ease the process and reduce the cost of obtaining a patent, but didn't include a reasonable enough objection mechanism. If you don't like the way it works, write your U S Senators and Congressmen!
CMGI's Nov. 13, 2000 press release mentions that Altavista was awarded "four new patents for search technology" which cover:
"proprietary search technology in the areas of identifying and eliminating duplicate pages in an index, ranking results by degrees of relevancy, data structures for searching and indexing, and 'spidering' techniques that crawl the World Wide Web and play a key role in building an index."
I used the U.S. PTO's patent database, searched for the string "altavista" under the "assignee" field and came up with these two gems:
6,138,113: "Method for identifying near duplicate pages in a hyperlinked database"
and
6,112,203: "Method for ranking documents in a hyperlinked environment using connectivity and selective content analysis"
Has anyone found the other Altavista search engine patents in question? They might have been awarded to a different firm, then licensed to Altavista.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Vergil Bushnell
Insects and Grafitti Photos
Sorry, but after a point the invention becomes common practice and common knowledge. By failing to file for the patent early on in a timely fashion, the inventor relinquishes the right to do so later.
Not only the original inventor, but also any other party...
Part of the problem with this is attempting to handle fraud cases through the civil courts.
From my little legal knowledge, I seem to recall that intellectual ownership (copyright?) of anything stays with a person until 50 years after their death or whatever. If this is the case, maybe a full and detailed documentation of the development of internet technologies and exactly who did what when, along with more outspeaking from computer pioneers will be able to counteract the validity of some of these 'patents'. Because as we all know, lots of these patents aren't just overly broad and obvious, they're things which were hacked up in universities and research labs decades ago. One of the sticking points, though, is proving to courts et cetera that an idea isn't 'novel' as they call it. In some cases, patent challenging has failed because something was SO obvious that no-one ever published any papers or anything on it. And so mr big company could say in court "no one thought of this before us" and nobody could get any evidence to counter this.
I was thinking that it would be a good idea to do a distributed war against those who try to enforce patents that are worthless. We could bake special "Patent Pies" and fling them at the faces of David Wetherell et al whenever they appear in public. Maybe they could be made of my granny's patented pecan pie recipe.
/. reader is 14 years old with plenty of free time, so we could be really effective.
Would this be violent and childish? Sure. But I see two things working in our favor. First, it's pretty damn violent and childish to abuse a clearly fatally broken system to put your competitors out of business, all the while claiming that it was they who stole from you. Second, the average
Walt
but ...
Is it enough?
I'm not a lawyer, and certainly not a patent lawyer, but as I understand it there's a process called `predatory patenting' where a company will find a patent that it wants (something that was patented by somebody else), and then patent every possible application of the original patent. All patents reference the original patent.
Basically that means that if you want to use any of these applications of the original patent, you have to have the permission of all patent owners involved.
(Normally this is done in an attempt to make the original patent holder allow the company in question to use his patent without royalties. Unfair, but apparantly legal.)
Well, in this case, there's no original patent (the Archie author didn't patent the idea of `indexing') ... but if AltaVista patents every possible use of indexing (patent 1: indexing HTTP sites, patent 2: indexing intranets, patent 3: indexing internets ... patent 644: indexing Pokemon collections, etc.) then we may still be screwed. Only the original idea (indexing ftp sites, and gopher sites if the Veronica author comes forwards) would be truly protected by the `prior art'.
It seems to me the only way out of this legal sinkhole would be to convince the Patent Office to actually apply the two most important tenants of patent law - 1: prior art invalidates a patent application and 2: the idea must not be obvious to the layperson. Tenant #2 is just as important as #1.
In any event, I hope I'm wrong :)
In this feedback-based system, the more companies that notice somebody is getting away with something (eg: patents that are blantantly obvious gambits for market dominance) the more instances you will find of this behaviour. They all drive for the gap in the wall with whatever they can scrounge up, hoping to make it before the lights come on. So it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Why? Because "the system" learns. The sight of somebody getting away with looting an unprotected store during a riot is all the incentive you need to draw others into that activity. And the process of applying for patents (along with the other legal forms of attack on the common good) is not set up to handle the kind of things it has to. So it fails to effectively discern between patents of value and mere speculation. Stopping it is going to be painful, costly, and drawn out. The companies who will get hurt aren't the ones who have already done their thing, but the blundering morons to come.
The side-effect of all this happening is that by fighting to gain the legal high ground based on Intellectual Property, Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents, we end up with a society that is being transformed at the very foundations: language. We are all victims, even the people in these corporations, of an undermining public speech. Holding back medecine from those who need it, holding back innovation because it isn't in the interest of the shareholders, forcing the market to bend to their will because they have the endorsement of what is supposed to be an organ of democracy.
This will continue as long as we allow it to.
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
the patent office has a very simple agenda... to let companies based in the United States rape the international patent treaties by patenting everything up to (or sometimes including) the kitchen sink, so if a foreign company actually does come up with something nifty and novel they can't use it in the United States. Since the Internet is global, future laws COULD set precedents that make the offending site have to block United States of Americans from accessing the site, or make the offender subject to extradition or something silly like that. Unfortunately allowing for patents on things like "one click shopping" (linking via cookie id to a database), Network Address Translation (rewriting the addressing part of a TCP/IP Packet), and others are simply ridiculous. IMHO, if one can implement something without looking at someone else's source code, then they should be able to LEAGALLY do it. This bullshit of patenting an extremely black-box concept is stupid. I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to patent the biological ATP to ADP conversion for respiration or something else like that.
</rant>
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
While this whole situation does suck, wouldn't this be a case where since he didn't file a patent on these underlying search technologies, anyone else could do so? If they have already been granted the patent, isn't that the end of it?
Remember it, write it down, take a picture, I dont give a fsck!
What I really hope that Slashdot readers get out of all this is that these patent problems are not limited to the "tech" industry. These problems abound - they are in every industry. Everything I do must be carefully researched because our whole industry (biotech/drug delivery) is a patent minefield. Everybody and their brother/sister has some sort of patent on some aspect of delivery methods, drug preparations, something... its just hideous - and we're left to either cave in and "lisence" something that shouldn't be, or to fight it in court. What's worse is when you find yourself having to apply for patents as well in order to stay alive. It has become a vicious circle that should never have happened in the first place. It really gets angering and frustrating - yet another wonderful source of stress... oh joy.
Again - the system really, REALLY needs to change - but who's going to do it?
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
If (when?) this patent gets shot down, it might start to send a message to other companies out there basing themselves off of frivolous patents.
Unlikely, if their only loss was a patent, if they were raided by someone like the FBI and shut down for at least as long as it took to try the people involved for fraud then that might send the right message.
But if that was likely to happen then the default with the USPO would be to deny patent applications.
Einstein worked at the patent office.
Apparently he was also highly cynical about the applications he saw, a skill current patent examiners appears to lack.
If AltaVista's crawler does things different, like using HTTP instead of FTP, or crawling without first knowing the fqdn of the well-known public servers, then they're not infringing (much).
Both of these differences involve tiny issues. How often are patents being issues when someone takes something well known and either makes some trivial change to it or writes the description in obscure language/jargon.
When this happens the only sensible way to regard the application is a fraud.
I can only speculate that a clueless moderator, who didn't read the article and doesn't know about veronica, thought that the post was an "Archie comics" joke. Whow knows?
Difficult to say. /. moderation is oftentimes very suspect. The most common abuse is to mod somebody as "flamebait" because you don't agree with what they're saying, even if the post is insightful.
Ah yes, but you are forgetting the very important fact that when CMGI sues, and it has been proven in the past that there patents are for a very specific set of ideas (blue A+green B) and not a very broad range (A+B+C..), then they can only sue for overlap in their patent realm. They can't say one thing in one court room, and say something different in another, any semi-competent lawyer would blow their case right out of the water.
Then again, on the flip side, if a courtroom upholds the overly broad patent range, then well, you all know how bad that it for the industry.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
WebCrawler opened to the public on April 20, 1994. It was started as a research project at the University of Washington. America Online purchased it in March 1995 and was the online service's preferred search engine until Nov. 1996. That was when Excite, a WebCrawler competitor, acquired the service. Excite continues to run WebCrawler as an independent search engine.
AltaVista opened in December 1995 as a Digital Research Project.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
In the Phillipines, if you can prove you invented something first, you're given the patent even if it's already been filed and granted to someone else.
/. or for a term paper I did a while back.
At least, I think. IANAPatent Lawyer Guy, but I seem to remember reading it, either on
Too bad this wasn't a Phillipino matter, eh?
J
The answer is potentially.
I'll try to answer this question in two parts.
1. First off, the US PTO has been soundly criticized for granting patents on software and business methods. While the rest of the world guffaws at the US PTO, the US government has been quietly attempting to "harmonize" patent examining procedures abroad.
For instance, on October 24, 2000, the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) drafted a Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Jordan concerning IP protection. Here is provision #5 of the MoU:
"Jordan shall take all steps necessary to clarify that the exclusion from patent protection of 'mathematical methods' in Article 4(B) of Jordan's Patent Law does not include such 'methods' as business methods or computer-related inventions."
In other words, the US government is attempting to export its penchant for granting lousy patents to other nations.
2. Second, consider an international convention is currently being negotiated between representatives of 47 nations. The Hague Conference on Private International Law's "Proposed Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgements in Civil and Commercial Matters" -- or "Hague Convention" is an attempt to render legal judgements between nations enforceable. If the Hague Convention is ratified by member nations, the following scenario may occur:
Multinational Corporation X (native to Britain) patents a fundamental web standard in the United States, where such patents are allowed. X sues its competitors (who reside in nations that do not tend to grant such patents) in a U.S. court, and under the Hague Convention, is able to make the judgement enforceable in other countries -- even if those other countries do not allow patents on web standards. Imagine what the Hague Convention might do to increase the liability of international Free-Software developers.
The U.S. PTO recently solicited comments from the public about the Hague Convention and its effect on patents and intellectual property. You can read the comments here. My organization also has a page on the Hague Convention here.
I hope that helps answer your question about the enforcement of U.S. patents abroad. Sincerely,
Vergil
Vergil Bushnell
Insects and Grafitti Photos
It's pretty safe to assume that like almost everyone else, the Patent Office (USPTO) prefers to be rich and powerful to the alternatives.
The more patents are issued, the bigger the USPTO needs to be. The easier it gets to get a patent, the more applications will come in. The organization grows and grows, and it is good to be in charge of the USPTO!
Until it becomes a question on the national political agenda, there is probably not much to do about it. Rounded off to the nearest percent of voters, nobody really cares about patents.
I don't think the precedent is that good.
The patent is for searching by using crawling. i.e. whenever a new page is found, searching the source of that page for links to other pages that haven't been indexed yet.
While you could possible do this for FTP sites by reading the mirrors list, it's hardly the same thing.
If there is a precedent, then I think it would have to have been from Gopher space. Has anyone talked to the creator of Veronica, or the mother Gopher people at UMN to find out how they created their databases?
Another possiblity is that the precedent would be from hypercard searches, or some other localized searching algorythm for linked data, but unless it was used for searching a network of computers, the CMGI patent might still have some validity.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Rather than blabber on about prior art without making any effort to show it, Alan Emtage actually is taking a stand against CMGI with this action. Congratulations for being so bold as to actually defend your work, Mr. Emtage!
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
Perhaps this will be the first step in reshaping patent law. If enough of the people who TRULY created these things come forward, and are supported by The System, perhaps mega-mondo-corps will stop trying to take all the credit (and profit).
If AltaVista's crawler does things different, like using HTTP instead of FTP, or crawling without first knowing the fqdn of the well-known public servers, then they're not infringing (much).
But then they still fail the obviousness test. Since ARCHIE was out there indexing the FTP sites, it would be obvious to a skilled practicioner of the art how to index HTTP.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I've been waiting for some of the 'Net pioneers to come out against this crap. Looks like Emtage is one of the few who has the resources to fight this!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It seems to me the only way out of this legal sinkhole would be to convince the Patent Office to ...
Stop there. The USPTO doesn't get involved with the conflict once the Patent is granted. The courts have to do that. A Patent is a 'right to sue,' and only the suits themselves can resolve the Patent.
[stock rant on the subject]
Patents are not about who is right, or who is first; patents are about who can sue.
The US PTO is a money-making service for the government, and this fact is why it operates as it does.
There is a misconception that it is the central duty of the PTO to form a blockade against granting patents. The PTO can and will block applications where there's heavy similarity with prior art or existing patents, but that's really just a guideline to using the service, not the core function.
The PTO's purpose is to grant patents for a fee, and it's wholly suited to do so.
The application vetting process of the PTO is a cost center for the operation of the PTO. This is akin to saying that customer service is a cost center for the operation of AT&T. It is required, but they'll cut costs as much as they can get away with.
To fix the patent application vetting process, two things must happen:
At the minimum, if the PTO would publish the abstract for each patent application at the time of filing, then third parties could submit "helpful" arguments against controversial applications. The PTO needn't publish the details, just the abstract; the PTO can then weigh obviousness against challenges without incurring the costs of doing all the searching themselves.
Once a patent has been granted, the Patent Office does not get involved in disputes; that is a matter for the courts.
[end of stock rant on the subject]
[
Just ask Arthur C. Clarke if he's owed any money by ComSat.
But Comsat didn't patent geo-synchronous satellites. IIRC the waterbed was ruled to be non-patentable because RAH had described it in one of his books.
Best Slashdot Co
The Slashdot Patent Pending logo is looking more and more realistic every day.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
lately, companies have been getting patents for all sorts of insanely simple things, including those with obvious prior art. Altavista wasn't even the first search engine one the web, let alone the internet as a whole. If (when?) this patent gets shot down, it might start to send a message to other companies out there basing themselves off of frivolous patents.
we can't stand for this, and this is an excellent first step
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
QED
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Since AltaVista's founding in 1995 our company has evolved impressively. In January 1999, we became a wholly owned subsidiary of Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE: CPQ). Compaq purchased Shopping.com in March and Zip2 Corporation in April of that year. Then in August of 1999, CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq: CMGI) acquired 83% of our outstanding stock from Compaq, and Shopping.com and Zip2 became wholly owned subsidiaries of AltaVista. Later that same year, AltaVista acquired Raging Bull, bolstering our financial expertise while adding a new community element to the AltaVista network. With this combination, AltaVista has integrated a broad range of commerce, content and search services under the AltaVista domain.
Today, we are expanding our services even further through strategic partnerships with leading best-of-breed content providers and aggressive international expansion. As always, AltaVista remains committed to providing our users with the best of the Web from a single, trusted source. As AltaVista continues to develop new and greater ways to reach our objectives and fulfill users' needs, our view from above promises to look ever more comprehensive and accessible.
AltaVista is a majority owned company of CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq: CMGI).
For a good laugh, check out CMGI's company profile on yahoo.
If AltaVista's crawler does things different, like using HTTP instead of FTP, or crawling without first knowing the fqdn of the well-known public servers, then they're not infringing (much).
Also, and this is a big also, if you make your work public, and don't file for a patent within a year, anyone can file based on their work without having to worry that you'll file on top of them. "Prior Art" depends not only on the existence of the "art", but on attempts to patent it.
And, of course, if you never make your process (i.e., the method, not just the shrouded executable) public, much less patent it, you have dick to say about it when PlutoPetaCorp beats you to the patent office.
Just ask Arthur C. Clarke if he's owed any money by ComSat.
--Blair
Once again, let me emphasize that it is simply pointless to speak about patents in the abstract. The abstract and general subject matter of the patent simply does not inform the question whether a patent is infringed or invalid. The bottom line is the specifics of the patent claims asserted and a particular apparatus or method usage alleged to infringe. Until you get to the details, you aren't saying anything interesting at all.
With respect to the article:
"Though I'm not a lawyer, the patents being 'defended' by CMGI/AltaVista include basic concepts that were incorporated into the Archie system years before the World Wide Web even existed," said Emtage.
It is clear that Mr. Emtage is not a lawyer. His statement has almost nothing to do with whether or not a particular patent is infringed or invalid. A patent that includes "basic concepts" incorporated into the prior art is not invalid therefor as a matter of law. If the prior art includes "basic concepts" elements A+B+"a blue C", and a later patent claims A+B+C+D, or even A+B+"a green C", the patent claim might well be valid. The devil is in the details, and the article offers none.
"Archie was crawling and indexed FTP sites with fairly sophisticated algorithms even as I was sitting at Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meetings with Tim Berners-Lee while he created the World Wide Web," Emtage continued.
For all we know, the patents in question may have already cited, directly or indirectly, to this very prior art. The issue is not whether the patents relate to pre-existing technology -- this is true of virtually EVERY PATENT EVER EVER. The question is whether the prior art was patentably distinguished in a particular claim. Note that the more significantly the prior art is distinguished (read limited), the less "dangerous" is that patent -- the less signficantly the prior art is distinguished, the more likely the patent would be invalid. And this analysis must be performed claim by claim. The broadest claims of a patent might be invalid, and the narrowest not infringed, while one remains that is both valid and infringed. As noted, the devil is in the details.
Talking about this stuff in the abstract is meaningless -- its just whining. Let's get to particulars. Name the patent and the prior art in question, then we can start talking. Until then, we are all spitting in the wind.
You can also see AltaVista's Brief History sixth paragraph). Archie FTP, AltaVista HTML.
The ad that I got for this article was for "Alta Vista Search Engine 3.0"
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I type the command:
ls -lR > file | grep string
Can I patent this? Is it my intellectual property?, or does it already belong to someone else?
Seriously though. I cannot believe how stupid some of these patents are.
I worked for a CMGI subsidiary which was a web hosting company and the biggest problem I saw there was that ALL of the management from lower level managers to high level VP's were all completely ignorant when it came to technology. They didnt know how to innovate all they did was try and squeeze what they could out of everything, even there customers. The managers at CMGI were no better, they all had no idea what they were doing. They were taking ideas from 20 somethings and throwing them millions, even the people knew it was not going to last. You just cant go from nothing to multi-billions without something being fishy! There was talk about these patents just over a year ago as a "strategy". What we all have to remember that up until a few years ago Altavista made firewalls and failed and now they are a portal and will fail! Use google.
It is however a sad comment on the part of the US Patent Office that this even has to take place. I already though that the patents should never have been awarded to Alta Vista, and now this adds more to that thought. Just what is the patent office's agenda? They really need straightened out quite badly... in my industry (biotech/drug delivery), there have already been a few more weak patents of bad ideas submitted... and at the current rate, I see no reason why the patent office won't approve them - even though the patents are not defensable in court. This is just really sad.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
I'm not a Smarty Man Pattent Lawyar either, but I believe in the US if you prove something existed before it was patented, it merely invalidates the patent and makes the invention PD.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
You cannot put people who seek job stability over anything else to manage intellectual creation issues. If USPO employees really cared about prior art, if they set their minds to truly and honestly investigating prior art, they wouldn't work at the Patent Office, they would be inventors.
And he should be disbarred.
A decent patent attorney would have told you to search for prior art FIRST, before you pay him to prosecute the patent application.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
1.- GRANT OF LICENSE
1.1 Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Bunyip grants to the Licensee a non-exclusive license to use and operate the Archie software to gather, manage and serve information. By installing and operating the Archie System the Licensee agree to be bound by the following terms and conditions.
l.2 The Licensee is licensed to operate ____________ simultaneous copies of the Archie System. The Licensee may use Archie software to gather and maintain multiple databases and the Licensee may configure its system to use additional computers as file servers to process and store the information gathered, but the information maintained by the Archie Systems covered by this License Agreement may only be served to users while operating Archie on no more than this number of computer systems (the Designated Computers).
l.3 The Licensee or the Licensee's employees are authorized to make an unlimited number of copies of the software for backup and archival purposes, but shall not have the right to transfer, share or otherwise release copies of the Archie Systems to third parties. Any such copy shall become the property of Bunyip.
l.4 In the event that the Licensee desires to transfer the use of the Archie System to a newly designated computer from the designated Computers set forth in paragraph l.2 of this License Agreement, the Licensee shall request prior written permission from Bunyip, which permission shall not be unreasonably withheld. Upon receipt of this permission the Licensee may transfer the use of the Archie System to the newly designated computer. The Licensee shall destroy all copies or records of the Archie System in the Designated Computers or shall transfer all of these copies or records to the newly designated computer and shall if required by Bunyip promptly certify in writing that no copies or record of the Archie System exist outside the newly designated computer.
l.5 The Licensee shall not have the right to sublicense this Agreement, and the Licensee shall not assign its license, whether voluntarily or by operation of law or otherwise without prior written approval of Bunyip.
3.- OWNERSHIP OF THE ARCHIE SYSTEM AND CONFIDENTIALITY
3.1 The Licensee acknowledges that the Archie System, software, documentation and associated information are the property of Bunyip, and that the only rights which the Licensee obtains to the Archie Systems and Licensed Materials is the right of use in accordance with the terms of this License.
3.2 The Licensee acknowledges that the Archie System and Licensed Materials contain proprietary and confidential information of Bunyip. The Licensee will take the same care to safeguard the Archie System and Licensed materials as it takes to safeguard its own confidential information and this care shall not be any less than would be taken by a reasonable company to safeguard its information. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the Archie System shall be accessible only to those employees with a need for access to perform their duties, and Licensed Materials shall be stored in a locked place and shall be accessible only to those employees with a need for access in order to perform their duties. Employees having this access shall be specifically advised in writing of the confidentiality of Archie System and Licensed Materials.
3.3 The license granted under this Agreement is non-transferable and authorizes the Licensee, on a non-exclusive basis, to use each Archie System solely on the Designated Computers so long as the Designated Computer remains in the exclusive possession of the Licensee. Any attempt by the Licensee to sublicense, assign or transfer any of the rights, duties or obligations hereunder is void.
3.4 The Licensee shall not derive or attempt to duplicate, or permit or help others to derive or duplicate, the source code relating to the Archie System.
3.5 In order to assist Bunyip in the protection of its proprietary rights with respect to the Archie System and Licensed Materials, the Licensee shall permit Bunyip to inspect during normal business hours the facility at which the Archie System is used and any facility at which the Archie System Licensed materials are stored. The Licensee shall advise Bunyip on demand of all locations where Archie System or any Licensed materials, or both, are stored, and shall provide Bunyip with access to the Archie System and Licensed Materials, including any copies of them.
7.- GOVERNING LAW AND ENFORCEMENT OF AGREEMENT
7.1 This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Province of Quebec, Canada. In the event of any dispute under the Agreement, a suit may be brought only in a court of competent jurisdiction of the Province of Quebec, Canada,
8.- COUNTERPARTS
8.1 This Agreement may be executed in counterparts in the same form and such parts as so executed shall together form one original document and be read together and construed as if one copy of this Agreement had been executed,
9.- LANGUAGE
9.1 The parties have required that this Agreement and all deeds, documents or notices relating thereto be in the English Language; les parties ont exige que cette convention et tout autre contrat, document ou avis afferent soient en langue anglaise.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the Parties have executed this Agreement, on the date and at the place first above mentioned.
BUNYIP INFORMATION SYSTEMS INC.
If Emtage were to get said patent and take a few million bucks from CMGI, I'm sure he'd find a far more productive use for the money.
How about setting up a foundation to bitch-slap companies like CMGI in court?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm really curious as to what people think are the reasons why we have had so many bad patents.
I can't immagine that there is one point source, but rather a range of reasons.
Is it corruption within the system, an incompetent system?
How much of this is due to problems in government, or greed of industry?
Where can we make changes to improve things?
Is the whole concept of IP flawed to begin with, or does patenting non-physical concepts have a place in the information age?
Is there a good informational resource that would answer some of these questions in a manner accessible to a legal and technical novice like myself?
These are breasts; this is source code.
These are breasts; this is source code.
Why do you have a problem with those two things belonging to one person?
You can't patent the alphabet because it's been in use for more than a year -- but go ahead, and invent your own if you like, and patent that. Better make it novel, though. Maybe add a letter for the "shwa" sound.
You don't apply for a copyright -- copyright is implicitly granted to the author of a piece of artistic work.
Since you didn't write the alphabet as a literary piece, you don't have copyright on it. On the other hand, you could paint a picture of the alphabet, and you would have copyright on that picture -- but not on the alphabet.
You could design a new font, and have copyright on it. Hell, you could probably submit it to the USPTO and say it was designed specifically to make writing easier when using a green pen and you'd get a patent on the font. Then you could write the alphabet in that font, and register that as your trademark.
But you couldn't patent "the alphabet". Get real.
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?