McAfee Patents ASP Business Model

Rob Kischuk writes: "According to an article at InfoWorld, McAfee.com has been granted a patent on its variety of "software as a service". No specifics on the patent, but the CEO's statement, "You either work with us, or you work around this patent", seems to indicate that more than a couple of ASPs could be affected." kerubi gets a cookie for sending in a link to the patent in question, or read McAfee's press release.

Comments

Re:Take a look at the title...

[Rogerborg]

• "Method and system for securing, managing or optimizing a personal computer"

I wonder how many times I'm going to have to post the simple advice to read to the end, to see that it gets even worse:

• Those skilled in the art may make numerous modifications and departures from the specific embodiments without departing from the spirit and scope of the claimed invention. For example [...]the software downloaded may be intended to perform tasks such as database management, word processing, spread sheet, games, or other tasks that are not specified herein.

yup, the usual

[SirSlud]

From the patent:

PointCast.TM., however, is configured only to deliver content to the browser of a computer over the Internet. It is not designed or equipped with the means to download executable programs to a storage device connected to a computer and execute them at the remote computer.

In other words: PointCast does exactly what our thing does, only we instruct the machine (on the clientside) to run the bytes transferred, while PointCast only displayed them.

Definately an invention worthy of lucrative licencing fees! I guess this makes them Mc-A-Fee.

Oh, and:

Those skilled in the art may make numerous modifications and departures from the specific embodiments without departing from the spirit and scope of the claimed invention.

In other words: This is a blanket patent. Please remember that when we're in litigation with a zillion other companies to obtain royalties.

Surprise

[technomancerX]

Surprise, surprise yeat another patent on something obvious that tons of people are doing... Although considering they filed in 1998 it may not be that hard o find prior art on this one. Arguably any form of web-based installer violates this patent (or counts as prior art) as software installation can be considered 'administration'.

Just for virus software

[MosesJones]

"The method of claim 6, said software package including a program to detect computer viruses on the remotely located computer"

So if it doesn't include a virus detector then it would appear to be okay.

Still seems a silly patent mind

Another bounty comming right up.

[thebitninja]

If Macafee have just filed this patent then there must be prior art out there.

Here is an excellent article on IP issues and mad patents.

Also check out IP.com and BountyQuest

so I imagine well be seeing something here about this soon!

I'm tempted to immediately blame the companies for doing this, but I guess they are just trying to work within the system to make money. It's the system that sucks. Still I'm gonna hold off buying that antivirus software for a while now.

Re:Can software patents be Good Things (tm) ?

[An Ominous Coward]

It won't set precedent for software parents in general being illegit, only that particular one.

Um ...

[mystik]

The patent abstract only seems to imply that this will cover remote recovery/maintence of PC's.

..which, Hard Drive recovery agencies have been doing for a while, I'd imagine.