Patent On 'Private' URLs

An anonymous reader writes: "Tumbleweed, 'secure' email via http with SSL, so, not really end-to-end secure, just got the patent on private URLs; "Tumbleweed IME generates a private URL for each secure delivery. The private URL that IME creates is unique, tied to the sender of the package or transaction, to the content being sent, and to the intended recipient." I guess I can't tell my buds to surf to a non-public directory on my website to download stuff anymore." Many web applications generate these private URLs. Like the cheesy insecure bookmarkable login URL that Slash uses for example (which is just your name and password plain text in the URL which you should never use unless you're on acid, lazy, and/or realize that losing your slashdot user account will in no way affect your life because you are not a moron and use a unique password so bring on the packet sniffers ;)

Comments

*yawn*

[msuzio]

OK, so it's another stupid patent. So? These things have to be tested to stand up, it's obvious that the US Patent Office just hands them out like Everlasting Gobstoppers at the Willy Wonka factory, so let's stop getting our knickers in an uproar every time this happens.
So, I'd suggest we just let them be patent-happy idiots, and maybe amass some prior art citations for the time when they sue Cmdr. Taco for Slash's infringement of their American right to innovate.

Re:*yawn*

[micromoog]

it's obvious that the US Patent Office just hands them out like Everlasting Gobstoppers at the Willy Wonka factory

As I recall, Everlasting Gobstoppers were treated as a corporate secret, worth many thousands of dollars to competitor Slugworth, and the factory handed out only five.

If the patent office treated patents like that, we'd be in good shape.

My blatant kharma grab

[fizbin]

Well, someone already beat me to it in pointing out that the patent was filed in 1997 (A suggestion to rob et al: on future stupid-patent stories, please give the filing date of the patent - it's not as if delphion makes it hard to look up.)

Oh, and here's the blatant kharma whoring: the patent (all seven claims) at delphion.

Re:It's not patents per se, it's their use

[MartinG]

By definition patents increase freedom

patent (ptnt)
1. a. A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.

Show me where the definition says it increses freedom.

we need more government control over corporate IP

Too much govermnent control and intervention is the whole problem.

they allow others to benefit from research and innovation done by people and companies, which would otherwise be held secret
Name a software related patent that does this or could have done this. How exactly would Amazons one click "technique" have remained a secret if they hadn't patented it?

Of course, unlike the GPL they let the originator make a profit, but that's good in a capitalist society

Firstly, the GPL most certainly does not prevent the originator from making a profit.
Secondly, artificially restricting control only to the originator gives them enough power to exploit everybody else. This tends to lead to monopolies and a small number of very large powerfil coroprations instead of a healthy competitive market.

The incorrect assumption you have made is that people do not do work voluntarily for others unless they can demand payment - after all why should they let others benefit from their superior abilities you might ask?
Well, whatever the reasons you might think that, it is wrong. If it were correct, nobody would be releasing GPLd software. Quite clearly, people (including many innovators) are releasing a lot of GPLd software.

Patents have outlived their usefulness to society and it's about time they we're reformed or ditched altogether.

prior art

[Anonymous Coward]

This patent is incredibly broad, covering any URL which identifies the document to be delivered, the intended recipient, and "other parameters". Everyone who handled user login using querystring data (remember the good ol' days before cookies?) has prior art on this. I've got sites dating back to '95 and '96 that do this, and I certainly got the idea from someone who came before.

O'Reilly's _CGI Programming_ is copyright 1996 and I believe it describes this kind of use for querystring data. In any case, I'm sure we all have CGI books on our shelves which show exactly this use of URLs and pre-date the 04/97 filing date of this so-called patent.

The legal force of a patent is in the claims

[yerricde]

Seriously though, the patent shows a specific example

All patents do. It's called a "preferred embodiment." All the legal force of a patent resides in the claims. Here's the first claim of the patent in question:

A document delivery system for delivering one or more documents between a sender and at least one recipient, said system comprising:

• a server that temporarily stores said documents, wherein said server generates a URL for each intended recipient of said documents, the URL unique to each recipient, and sends each of the URLs to each respective intended recipient; and
• a database which is associated with said server and which records log data describing which recipients accessed said documents;
• wherein said server sends the log data to the sender of said documents.

Translation: If your web database uses a session_id in the GET URL, you infringe. Even Google DejaNews infringes.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

What about Pathfinder?

[weave]

My first encounter with session IDs was on the pathfinder.com web site. This *had* to have been around 1995 or so. I remember being annoyed by them when trying to bookmark them.

They had a URL with a session ID the @ signs surrounding them, so

pathfinder.com/somestory/ expanding to pathfinder.com/@344656654645@/somestory/

pathfinder.com was registered in 1993. It was where Time-Warner gathered all of their print publication stories at. It's now defunct.

Non-obviousness

[Jon Erikson]

And yet I have yet to actually see someone come up with evidence of prior art. There have been some claiming existence of evidence as early as August '97. But that doesn't predate the patent application.

IIRC, once a patent has been granted there is a period of a year in which if the same idea is reimplemented then it is taken as proof that the idea is obvious and the patent is invalid. So these claims, whilst not prior art, do show that the patent isn't nonobvious. See here for more info.

Re:It's not patents per se, it's their use

[ChaosDiscord]

Because otherwise the knowledge would be locked away as a trade secret and nobody else would be able to benefit from it, even indirectly. And there wouldn't be any clause causing it to expire either. So yes, a patent does increase freedom. That's the whole point of them.

Encryption techniques or compression algorithms could easily be kept secret without patents.

The point of patents is to encourage the release of knowledge, not freedom. For 17 years, that knowledge protected by patents is not free, I am not free to do with it as I will. If I independently rediscover the technique, I'm still out of luck.

However, if the knowledge is protected by trade secret, I'm free to rediscover the knowledge or reverse engineer it and use it as I want. If you've sold me a product that does encryption or or compression and is protected by trade secret, I'm free to disassemble the code and figure out how it works. Large companies with incentive to gain the technique can do research to rediscover it or hire a team of hackers to reverse engineer it. I may have less knowledge of this techniques, but I have the freedom to gain that knowledge, and once gained, to use it however I want.

So, I'm still not clear on how "by definition patents increase freedom...."

Thanks to the careful crafting of the GPL, it's next to impossible to write a Linux application that doesn't have to be GPLed.

Ummm, no. It's quite easy to write Linux applications that aren't GPLed. You simply don't use any GPLed code. I'm paid to develop and maintain a closed source application on Linux. No problems with the GPL at all. Never had to seriously think about it. The GPL doesn't seem to have been a problem for Netscape (pre-Mozilla), Sun (StarOffice before it was released), Corel (PhotoPaint, Draw, Wordperfect), Opera, and others.