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IBM Patents Web Page Templates
jalefkowit writes: "More follies from the US Patent & Trademark Office ... now IBM has been awarded US Patent #6,304,886 for software that automatically "generates [a] customized Web site without the Web site creator writing any HTML or other programming code", based on "a plurality of pre-stored templates, comprising HTML formatting code, text, fields, and formulas" that are then customized through the process of asking the user a few questions. In other words, they've patented the ubiquitous wizards found in FrontPage and other newbie-oriented HTML editors. This was submitted to the USPTO on June 19, 1998 -- surely someone out there knows of prior art for this?"
I have prior art. I use templates for all my websites. Instead of creating a new product page from scratch I always have a pre-made template which i then modify. Can I please have $10 million dollars? Thanks,
David
We wrote VB apps to generate pages for our employees with minor interaction. Had some c++ apps that generated html from databases. Its sad this stuff gets in.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
I wrote code for this in (Openmarket's - then ICentral's) Shopsite Manager back in 1997. Fill in your products, pick some options, get an e-commerce website. Sigh.
--Just the place for a snark!
I'm not sure when ms word got the ability to save HTML, but combine that with the generic document-generating wizards it has and *presto* you've got html templates. Not that everyone wants to read a web page that starts off "Interoffice memo"....
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
IBM espouses so much about being an open company and promoting open things. And then they go and pull something like this. I seriously don't get this company. I really want to like them but more and more I can't.
If not, I'd better jump on the bandwagon! Big money ahead, look out Bill Gates!
-Dark Cobra, future owner of Wheels Incorperated (if such a company does not currently exist)
Sure, how about FrontPage97?
-foxxz
Yes, patents are evil. But I'd rather have IBM, who is it at least *partially* open source friendly have this patent, than say, Microsoft, who could license it in such a way that only Frontpage + IIS would be allowed to use templates...
The RIAA patents sound in an attempt to draw royalties on everything that makes any sound including but not limited to musical works and things that go bump in the night.
Film at 11:00
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
It would be like patenting dirt, although many people have dirt in their house. Many people use web templates, and I can just see people who didn't use it getting sued because their pages look like they came from a template. All the poor newbies will have to pay royalties to have their useless information posted.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Are the people in the patent office uneducated? People that work in that kind of field need to be educated in technology, so that they don't make inane mistakes such as this. If you understand what a template is, you would also understand that it's nothing new or innovative that deserves intellectual property protection. Next thing you know, someone will patent window styles.
-Shade
A friend of mine (Nathan Anderson) wrote something that I believe is quite like this, and posted it right here to slashdot, a number of years ago. Here is the article. Judge for yourself. When he sees this he'll probably post something about it as well. Does this count as prior art?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Frontpage 97 had that feature. I remember it all too well! ^_^
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
Someone has to answer this.
"customized Web site without the Web site creator writing any HTML or other programming code", based on "a plurality of pre-stored templates"
In 1996 I wrote JavaScript that would give a different action based on browser detection. This did require "programming."
I recently wrote a content manangement system (1999) and e-commerce site, the creator does no programming. Steuben.com.
Same workaround: different browsers see different-looking page (CSS or simplified version for IE 3.0, which cannot deliver different colored links on the same page). Similar effects for other features, pop-up windows etc. Also different menu actions. Many done with included page fragments ("templates").
Perhaps a lawyer would say I am the creator, although the tools were handed over to non-techies, they loaded all the images, content and products and now run the site.
Another answer is browser detection sending to a Flash or vanilla html site. Which are "templates."
Am I missing the point?
"Help him! Help the programmer!"
wouldn't this cover any program that has a "save as HTML" option?? That lets you create HTML without typing any HTML codes, and somewhere in the guts of the program are some HTML templates, right?
Didn't GeoCities have a site builder back in 95 or 96?
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
umm great, IBM has patented the WYSIWG html editor. I'm pretty sure that every single WYSIWG html editor allows a user to enter in non-html (or programming) code & almost every single of these editors have a blank page loaded when you select "new page" that has the basic html head & body tags already there. .htaccess can be considered prior art. sheesh.
what is really interesting is:
"Based on roles-based, multi-level security, certain users of the web site may have access to certain information and others may not"
so basically any single website I've written in the past 3 years that uses php functions &
a patent of beowulf clusters?
:-P
Think about it. The patent was filed in 1998.
IBM (AFAIK) not proclaiming to be open
and friendly yet. That didn't happen until
a bit later (circa 2000?)
Were that I say, pancakes?
Is the Patent Office not supposed to examine a patent before issuing it.I am sure the USPO employs a number of people who are fairly conversant with Computing Technologies,is it that they now need people who can understand ENGLISH??
Wanted : A Signature.
DAMN THEM! Maybe I can patent religion.... wait...that's scientology... damn... any ideas?
So it's not THAT bad actually. I mean, it could be M$ that got it, instead.
Am I not now as I type this building a web page using no html of mine own? Also claimed in the patent was something to the effect of different users would have different priveleges, and as such not all users would have access to all the information?
--Anton
--- Have you seen MURL?
Why doesn't the patent office implement a system whereby patent holders who are found to be abusing the system are denied the right to file any further patents for a specified period (say, 5 years) or lose the rights to other more valuable patents that they own? I think that'd make corporations like IBM which are looking to make a buck off trivial patents think twice about what they're doing. This software patent madness has to stop before it spreads to Europe.
IBM seem to be pretty good about this. Remember both IBM and Unisys held patents on LZW compression (IBM's application was filed 3 weeks BEFORE Unisys), but it is Unisys that tried to extract all the money from it. IIRR IBM have released may of their patents to the public domain.
IBM has just been awarded the patent for forms that submit information on webpages.
An IBM representative comments that, "With this new technology coupled with our template system, we have created a new interactive webpage in which users can enter information and get an automated reply, the future is here!"
Hello Gentlemen,
All your web templates are belong to us.
They later added.....
Sorry, MS, we got here first.
In working for an IP law firm, I see the rediculousness that is the USPTO every day. The fact that they could grant such a patent doesn't surprise me in the least.
Is IBM's IP department that bold/dimwitted that they intend to defend this patent and get some money? Does anyone have any information on this?
No self-respecting company should yield to this possible threat from IBM, anyway. There would be plenty of examples of prior art (as has been already shown by posters above). Even if IBM came knocking around my door about this (I'm about to use this newfangled "templates" thing on some intranet sites), I'd tell them in the most polite way to go fuck themselves. Maybe we can file this away under "stupid but harmless".
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Maybe someone with a better memory could correct me, but I believe that Geocities would count as prior art. Their old template driven design existed in '95-'96 IIRC.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
I'm just afraid of waking up... somebody might have patented THAT!
good, that idiot sllort finally got the moderation he deserved. stupid troll...
if i tell you my ideas i'd also have to kill ya.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
I guess this will cover XSLT, DTD's and Cacoon. CRAP! Now what will I do? Next they will patent the GUI! oh wait
the way things are going, patents have become like like good domain names
everyone should get the best patents while they can
it's a patent free-for-all
and it has made quite a joke of the system
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
This is a fairly specific patent. After having a look at it im not really concerned. Their definition of "tool" is a little loose, which bothers me somewhat.
Having worked with content management systems in both PHP and ColdFusion using a WebBrowser and a VB client for managing the content.
The chances your specific interface emulate completely IBMs described interface are little to none.
Before I rise up to say how evil IBM is I will say this. Patents are an eventuality. It is like a nuclear arms race, if you don't patent it someone else will, and then they can use it against you or at least hold it over you.
Is this new, unique, exciting, or worth a patent? No probably not. It seems from their description to be little more than a super-duper WYSIWYAG (What you see is what you almost get) type site builder. WIth IBMs drive to do ecommerce this definitely fits with thier overall marketing and business plans.. This would obviously be for the low - medium end of the ecommerce spectrum
THe system also defines a system of content approval and rights of some sort
All in all I have designed systems this in depth or more. The systems may do similar things but the means of doing it are invariably almost completely different. (Of course my system focuses on already having a site and allowing an administrator to build the site without the overhead of really thinking up the design aspect at all.. just manage the content)
Again, this is just an incremental evolution.
Jeremy
Userland Frontier has been doing that since at least 1995 (the Aretha release).
dunno if this qualifies...
here goes...
there was this old commodore basic program for the
pet's called paperclip, we learned how to do form
letter's back in '85 using basic text templates
with placeholders...
wait!
who owns commodore again?
back in the day we didnt have no old school
I've filed a patent on any internetwork protocol ("IP") driven discussion forum centering on issues related to, but not limited to: communications technology, free speech issues, computer science, intellectual property policy, sociological interpretation of trends in technology and technology law, and recreational interests (science fiction, video games, anime et. al.) commonly associated with the "technologically savvy".
CmdrTaco, consider yourself served! I'm still waiting for all that money you owe me for continued use of your DNA.
Also, I've ammended my slashdot user agreement to include an arbitration clause (persuant to the broadest possible interpretation of the Federal Arbitration Act) so I won't actually be seeing you in a "court", per se.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Having interned at IBM for a summer (2000), I was somewhat nauseated during a meeting I sat in on where the focus was 'What can we patent?'. While I understand the purpose of such meetings, anything not nailed down was fair game to have a patent attempted for it.
We were constantly reminded that IBM was the corporate leader of patents (whoo hooo! How about getting my damned stock price up again!) and that meetings like this were common.
I found it to be pathetic.
a month or two ago I needed to convert some old IRC-type (though not actually IRC) logs to a more-readable format. I was far too lazy to spend the thirty minutes to an hour required to put in the HTML on each line of the file...
So I downloaded perl, spent the next day learning its basics, and.. get this.. made a program to create pages based on a template and using a few user-selected options. I still use it on the rare occasion I need to convert something.
Here's just an idea for a postulate:
if it takes less than a minute between being presented with a problem and comming up with the solution, the solution is not nonobvious. I dont care how fucking smart you may think you are. Being able to apply the solution within that minute doesnt matter, as long as you have the idea for it in your head, because these patents dont cover specifics, but concepts. So you came up with the concept, it's not nonobvious.
Thought Process to any problem:
1) "Damnit, I dont want to have to do this.."
2) "Wish I had something to do it for me.."
3) "Seems like it would be easy enough, just inserting this same code over and over again, it's finding the splits by eye which is taking so long.. I could do it through find and replace but replacing one thing adds something to the block which would trigger the find and replace elsewhere. Then there's some cases I want other things to happen.. and I also want t move around some of these blocks.."
4) [all the above becomes general outlines in your head]
5) "Hey, didnt Vhalros say something the other day about how perl is good with Regexps..?"
time: probably no more than 45 seconds. The human brain does some great things with parralell proccessing.
I think it took longer to figure out how to use the wheel effectively using an axel, and I'm pretty sure that one's considered obvious.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I'll just patent your ideas! and "actions which take live away from individual"
Why don't we hear about this stuff _before_ it's a done deal? I realize that the chances of it actually affecting any given person are slim to none but in the event that this type of patent actually gets leveraged in some way or other, I'd prefer to have a chance to voice my objection before the patent is actually granted.
IBM file patents because it makes them money. IBM held the patent for the blinking cursor for a long time. The blinking cursor patent made them a lot of money. I wouldn't be surprised if the IBM employees who filed that patent in 1998 (a long time ago in Internet Time), exposure to web authoring was limited to writing a webpage in an editor that worked in mosaic. The fault is in the patent office for taking such a stupid patent.
i would think this would apply to anything and not just applications. That being the case a lot of website places have had this around for a while. Angelfire (www.angelfire.com) at least has had it there since '97 if not earlier
that wasn't hard i flipped open my netscape gold book from 1996 that has a homepage maker in it.
that was easy
come on bring it on
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I'm no expert on deciphering patent-language, but the free community hosting service I started in April 1998 seems to do more or less exactly what this patent covers.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Yeah, I can think of an example of prior art
...
for customizing preformatted text files to
produce new text documents on the fly.
Its called "mail merge"
Someone really, really needs to get a clue over at the old patent office. This and so very many other idiotic patents have slipped through the US patent office in the last few years.
There's TONS of prior art on this. I worked on a product for Proxicom in 1997 that let you fill out a fancy wizardy thing that built websites from your web browser.
Everyone has mentioned FrontPage97, etc, etc, etc. This really is criminal -- when you do a patent search, you're supposed to DO A PATENT SEARCH, which also includes A SEARCH FOR PRIOR ART.
And the patent office should ALSO DO A PRIOR ART SEARCH. What the hell?
-nate
The chance of getting your patent granted and the speed with which this is accomplished has nothing to do with the merits of the application.
On the contrary it's a function of the "Apple Pie" rating of the patent filer. The "Apple Pie" rating is a metric of how American the patent filer is.
For example, IBM and Microsoft are large well-established US corporations whose activities are likely to benefit the US government and economy in general. Thus, their Apple Pie rating is high and patents are granted without a second thought.
Contrast this to a foreign company held in an Allied company such as Britain, Germany or Australia. Such companies would have a much lower Apple Pie rating but would be prioritised above an applicant from Iran or the Sudan.
Essentially it's legal intellectual piracy. The patent office is riddled with incompetence and corruption. No-one notices since it's not immediately obvious what the stakes are.
IBM alone files thousands of patents a year. Ever wonder just what obvious, predated, prior-art patents they've got a lock on. Go on in and have a look. The malfeasance of the US patent office is both astonishing and disgusting.
Some small people with CREATIVE ideas cannot go to patent their creation because of the legal fees, plus the pattent application fees, (a patent application plus extras comes over 5000$ easily for those of you who don't know)... meanwhile, big companies can patent useless stuff that will break innovation (I'm starting to hate that word) instead of it's root concept of being to PROTECT I.P.
:) ).
Of course this means, those who might actually BENEFIT from the system for a just cause cannot access it (well depending on your cashflow as a startup for example , you have that great idea, you get 100K$ seed money to develop a simple prototype application/device so you can demonstrate your idea and get even more financing... will you use 5 to 10% of that budget for a PATENT (which will bring even more fees in the process) or will you concentrate on the project itself? Yep.. you guessed it right, and as soon as you go for your round of financing and approach people with money, funny how those NDAs mean nothing for them (since anyways, you won't be able to sue them) and if you get thru all of that crap, normally you get bought out for a fraction of what you could have made, because probably the investors will tell you if you don't comply with their rules they'll invest in that X company that can pull out the same thing and even better (and drive you out of buisness) etc etc, so probably you lose control over your project (51% shares not to you), and if you're really unlucky, the appointed CEO is a jerk and makes the whole thing goes down... if it works and becomes a success, notice you probably not even have 1% of the company with the dillution and all the maths applied after. (still, 1% of 100M$ is not too bad if you get there
Of course with SOFTWARE it can be a bit more positive, but for let's say, some cool hardware application, or innovative invention, it's another story.
This is almost depressing. heh...
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Murray Hill, NJ -- Today AT&T sued IBM for patent infringement, noting that IBM's patent on web templates is an infringement of AT&T's patent on #include.
#include, found in the C language's preprocessor, was invented in the early 1970's by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. "The #include directive is really a very innovative invention", said John Law, director of language sales at AT&T. "The technology landscape just wouldn't be the same without it".
Representatives from IBM were unavailable for comment, but were heard muttering something about how they "can't stand it when someone beats us to it".
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Someone read the ABOUT box on Microsoft FrontPage Express 98, the version bundled with Windows 98. Surely some of those patents cover what IBM is trying to repatent?
I've always thought IBM to be one of the "less evil" big companies, but maybe that's a wrong perception, in light of the failing hard drives, and now trying to steal another company's I.P.
IANAL, JKoebel
I could be wrong here, but it sounds like this could apply to more than just wizards. What about web-based content management tools, which allow the user to copy and paste plain text into an input box, check a few options, and have HTML pages generated on the fly?
(I tried reading the claims of the patent to see if this is true, but got lost in legalese. The patent has 24 claims, and I'm assuming each of those claims must be violated in order to be considered patent infringement.)
Glad to see that my code has made it into the history books! I wish they had bothered to tell me about it, though.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=/netahtml/search-adv.htm&r=2&p=1 &f=G&l=50&d=ft00&S1=nazem.INZZ.&OS=in/nazem&RS=IN/ nazem
Not sure how this conflicts/contrasts with the IBM patent.
I just realized the paramount reason to not patent internet "inventions"... by the time it gets approved, nobody gives a damn about it anymore. This thing was submitted in June of 98, for crying out loud!
RP
How about Ralf Engelschall's WML language? According to the copyright, WML came about in 1996.
You can patent:
discovery.
method, and includes a new use of a known process,
machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or
material.
(Taken liberally from United States Code Title 35 - Patents, Part 2, Chapter 101.
So if they patented the process of the Auto-generation of HTML, then they'd be patenting a process, not the tool to complete the process.
Punks. This whole patenting of software is ridiculous. I have a friend who works for a med-tech company, and they're always looking for things to patent... he's filled out so many of those damn forms he could do it in his sleep. Is the company doing well? Is the company valuable? Nah... that'd make sense ;-).
"Content's a bitch."
Welcome back to the shitlist!
Does the patent cover CGI scirpt that produce HTML on the fly? Does that mean that all dynamic page are covered by the patent?
--=.=-- www.cyber2000.qc.ca
a quick and dirty product that uses a Paradox database engine under Windows to generate a mass of perl scripts to auto generate a simple web store, complete with graphics, etc., which are then uploaded by the program to you site on a Unix server.
By Stumpworld Services, the owners of which have since sold the company and got out while the getting was good. It is now integrated with a hosting service, which cuts out the hassle of mom and pop businesses trying to deal with clueless ISPs.
The date of the original software press release to market was July 15, 1998, and there was an extensive beta period before then.
I think there is enough prior art to have this covered.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Hi there. I led a team that developed the Interactive Advertising Agent, a product that allowed a user to create a customizable web site, including forms and layout customization. This product was released in 1996. If you are a person or company who would like a copy of this software as a defense against this patent, please let me know. I'm going to try to make it available on a public HTTP server, but that will take a while.
People should stop complaining when organisations do what they are designed to do - namely make money (in the Patent Office's case, this means granting as many patents as possible). Don't bitch about the RIAA when they push for freedom-curtailing laws - THEY DON'T CARE - their job is to protect the interests of those who pay their salaries. Don't bitch when a for-profit corporation exploits dumb laws to increase their profit margins - THEY ARE DESIGNED TO DO THAT.
Instead, bitch about the stupid laws which allow and encourage them to do this, and the customers who keep them in business (of course, very few of IBM's customers are likely to take a stand on this issue - but IBM does seem to care quite a bit about its reputation among the Open Source community these days).
This is just the latest in a *long* line of trivial, abusive patents that have been discussed on Slashdot. They all make a mockery of what intellectual property rights are intended to protect, which is innovation.
What, other than making sarcastic comments about 1-click shopping, can actually be done to effect change on how patents are granted?
Who's e-mailbox should we all slam with requests for reasonable IPR laws?
Anyone?
-Rothfuss
I seem to remember Netscape Gold 2.02 (from 1996 or 1997?) having a WYSIWYG editor.
Given the length of time it takes to work a patent through the system, I'm sure we're going to have many more years of foolishness like this ahead.
Patents exist.
There are two things that patents do:
One is a sword, one is a shield.
If IBM doesn't use the patent as a sword, then who should care? Nobody. If they start charging royalties for those who "infringe," if they start trying to attack other companies who have since done the same obvious thing, then you can sound the alarms of righteous indignation.
Until then, STFU. Please.
[
Implement it so that the user must insert a heading tag thus having entered programming code. Also theres the (good) argument that the content is code too.
... is obviousness. Average web designers with average skill sets were doing this same thing since before the patent was filed, because it made their jobs simpler.
Doens't this sound a bit like when BT came out and said that they had the hyperlink patented about 2 years ago? Now we have IBM with THIS move of genius... I think someone should write a paper showing how these 2 patents overlap one another. Let these 2 bumbling fools beat on each other for a while in the courts.
Software patents are bad ideas, always have been. I hope Europe doesn't succumb to these little devices of the devil.
After all, you can't REALLY have fun until you have some underpaid patent clerk making decisions that result in huge lawsuits which are appealed until the end of time with nobody truly winning...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Around the time this was submitted to USPTO IBM's Net.Commerce package was being promoted heavily. I worked at a small web development company that was an "IBM Business Partner".
One of Net.Commerce's "features" was the ability to buiild a complete "internet storefront" with their template system. The template system was TERRIBLE. Anyone who has had any experience with it would agree... Anyone?
It is indeed the first post.... but your lack of brains stops you from being lame
All your page are belong to us!
Does all of this conversation spawn from boredom? The ONLY reason this topic was modded up to the main page is that it's Funny. IBM cannot enforce this patent. Anybody with at least half a brain, can see that it is not non-obvious. In fact, the Patent Office could use a rule similar to this to avoid handing out idiotic patents in the software industry:
./ers? Bored?
The birth of computers obviated the USE of computers to automate tasks that previously would have been done manually or with another device. Thus any use of a computer to automatically do anything that would have previously been done by hand or with another tool is obvious. This also applies recursively. In other words, any use of a computer to automate the operations of a computer to do work that would have previously been done through manual usage of a computer is also obvious.
This one simple, OBVIOUS rule would strike down just about every software patent in existence, and only grant software patents that were truly deserving. I can't think of a truly deserving software patent off the top of my head, but methinks the posibility COULD exist.
Either way. Why all the drama,
Based on the vague generalities of the patent, I think I could claim prior art based on Perl programs I wrote back in 1997 that did this very thing. User goes to web site, has a variety of templates they can choose from, inputs some information for the web page, format, etc., and presto! The new page is uploaded directly to a web site that hosts the user under a unique name, along with all the other users that made their own pages. In addition, the user could go back and modify the page later if desired. Completely automated from start to finish, no HTML required.
I wrote several versions of this program for different companies, none of which (to my knowledge) managed to survive the dot-bomb. But I know for a fact that my idea wasn't an original one; several other sites were doing the same thing. I visited these sites to see what they did so that I could 'one-up' them with my own program and improve on what they had to offer.
So unless I've got the wrong take on IBM's patent *I* can prove prior art. I might even have the programs backed up somewhere in storage. But there are others that can prove prior art to *my* claim as well.
How can IBM expect to enforce this claim? This wasn't something new and innovative at the time the patent was submitted.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Look to the patent claim, which governs the scope of the patent grant. Understand that the meaning of that claim may depend upon many other things. And be cool -- most patents are much narrower than they seem to a lay reader.
BTW, I'm patenting all one-click jokes.
Table-ized A.I.
packages of templates can be customised for different corporations.
who has access to the pages, and who controls uploading, can be set through passwords or whatever.
at least in part, it's kind of lotusnotes hting for putting up collaborative group sites and nets, with the ability to specify retrieval of non-html resources that are then presented in html.
also, in the case of e-commerce:
The customer may then be presented with specific information via the company's Web site. For example, a specific price of merchandise may be displayed to an appropriate customer (e.g., a large volume buyer) and another price may be displayed to a different customer (e.g., a first time buyer).
maybe jeff bezos read this, no?
IBM employees get a nice lump sum of money (like on the order of $2500) for every patent they file. So, frivolous patents like these don't necessarily represent an evil attempt to control intellectual property so much as "I want the latest new gadget, gotta pay for it" combined with lawyers who don't know the difference.
Enough said.
Um, no.
The protection is a side effect of the publication of the patent. The same effect could be achieved simply by publishing (an academic paper, Open Source software, a web-page, whatever) without patenting.
The only reason you patent is so that you can sue.
my.yahoo.com had customizable portals before 1998.
Anyone want to buy some cookware?
Does SlashDot's Slashcode fall under this description?
file a patent on filing patents on obvious software practices for which there exists lots of prior art.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I joined Amazon.com as an engineer just before they went bonkers over patents. As a long time free software fan, the whole one-click deal was a real shock! A bunch of us who worked there were totally bummed.
We were told not to talk about the "one click" patent AT ALL. So people would write "I'm not talking about it", etc, on elevator whiteboards.
It was a sad joke. And oh yes.. The whiteboards went away as the layoffs came.
The patent keeps talking about "HTML", but never mentions XML. Thus, just use XML instead of HTML, and then translate the XML at the end to HTML. (Unless some greedy idiot patented all XML-to-HTML translation. I would not put it past the retards at the patent office.)
Just a thot.
Table-ized A.I.
This seems only to cover the generation of multiple, browser-specific versions of the same web page from one template. It doesn't cover template-based HTML generators generally.
...at least Microsoft didn't get the bad PR for this one ;)
Coincidince?
-- The Hoss Man
I wonder if Osama will bother paying any royalties to them.
Table-ized A.I.
a beowolf cluster of lawyers all prepared to sue you for that? :)
#include <stdio.h>
int main (int argc, char** argv) {
char buff[100];
printf ("Please enter in your web text: ");
scanf ("%s", buff);
printf ("Your web page: <HTML><BODY><b>%s</b></BODY></HTML>\n", buff);
}
I don't know what the rule is for "prior art" (does it need to be published?), but I worked for Nando.net back in the early-to-mid 90s and we had a system that would qualify. We had a legacy system for newspaper editors that eventually got the data back in those systems back to a series of Perl scripts that we wrote that formatted it according to the site's format. Anyway, the editors wrote only text - no HTML.
I seriously doubt that they still use the same system, though.
Fuck 'im up, Tim! His views are invalid! -Pirate Corp$
Might it not make sense that IBM, (now a good open source ally) is now actively, and proactively plugging holes in the anti-open source dike?
After all, we've often discussed on this very site the notion of patenting everything we think of, as a community, as a hedge against the multinationals!
Big Blue could very well be on our side here. God knows.. given all of the support they've supplied, and how severely entrenched we are so far, pissing us off NOW would be a Bad Business Move(tm) on their part. They have everything to lose, and very little to gain if they actually think this patent is truly enforceable.
I vote a Benefit of the Doubt for IBM.
Who's with me?
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
I use a perl-based template system since Dec 1997 - how should I proceed to ensure my rights to keep using my system and even consider to question IBM's patent? Legally I mean.
Hey, I hate to bitch, but I kinda thought that the web was a non-object in 1986. Perhaps you got sucked into a timewarp(.org) and meant to say 1996?
Boo hiss to all of those who would say IBM is embracing open source philosophy in one hand and usurping power in the other. They may mean to protect themselves (and as a result, the rest of us) from the likes of Amazon. Well, I sure hope this is a defensive patent.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
IBM: "I patent the HTML wizard"
MICROSOFT: "Well I patent HTML"
IBM: "Well I patent the whole internet."
MICROSOFT: "Well I patent all the computers."
IBM: "Well I patent YOU!"
MICROSOFT: "Well I patent you times one thousand"
IBM: "I patent you times one million"
MICROSOFT: "I patent you times infinity. No returnsy, personal jinx, sucks to be you!!!"
*SMACK!*
MICROSOFT: "MOM!... IBM hit me!"
MOM (aka US Supreme Court): "Stop your whining! I thought I told you: 'No more patenting after you stole Java from your baby brother'."
:)
It seems one needs a plug-in to view the patent images, which are in TIFF. Which one do linux users use? The site suggested Plugger, but that only provides an interface to netscape's plugin mechanism. What actual app?
Well thats probably true, but from firsthand experience the examiners I knew usually searched previous patents in the field first before they search other things like academic journals and other published stuff.(if they happened by some miracle to have enough time to get that far)
What about geocities. Many moons ago, there was an html page wizard, if memory serves, not code and just body and you pick from templates and such. Would this work?
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
What?! Is IBM doing this kind of low-life work?! Ok, that is enough for me. Hah! Now, I will never, EVER help them out with their Linux campaign. Let them rot!
Is IBM trying to steal IP? I've built tools that do this before, and so has a gazillion others.
This is simply brain dead. That's like trying to patent the idea of a WYSIWYG HTML editor or the concept of prepackaged brownie mix (that doesn't require you to know how to mix the ingredients yourself)-- or all tools that can write macros based on simplified user input and a predefined formula (wasn't there someone much before IBM that invented this idea). Asside from patenting specific inovations IBM actually implemented in this field, how are they gonna pull that one off since everyone except IBM are the originators of these ideas. IBM didn't invent this, and surely wasn't the first company to build web templates that can be assembled with-out HTML coding!
--- Delta0.. makes no difference.
the chord progression on a guitar, E, A, B.
all you r0x0rz 0w3 ME l00t!
.cig
1.) Who defines "abusing the system," and how does that person judge whether a company honestly didn't know aabout the existence of prior art?
2.) This would give a small, obviously under-regulated office a very broad latitude to cripple technology companies for years at a time.
"It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man."
Fuck IBM.
And, hell, while at it, fuck the patent office with a broomstick.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
If I'm not mistaken, wouldn't something like the /. user preferences be under the wing of /. ops answer this one?
this patent? After all, the preferences allow you to customize the html presented to
you without the need to actually write any html on your own -- it asks you questions
about how you want it to be presented, and you get what you ask for. How long has this
system been in effect? Can any
A wise person makes his own decisions, a weak one obeys public opinion. -- Chinese proverb
How about using the OBVIOUS argument???
How about prior art with record... I built www.rational.com in early 1997 using a DOM based templating system in similar to what is now XSLT. We could even render documents in multiple presentation formats depending on user parameters. I know of robust templating pratices implemented as early as 1995. This crap will never stand...
------
oo_void
http://www.badassgeek.com
The problem here is not that IBM uses a screwed up patent system to their advantage, the problem is that the patent system is screwed up in the first place.
What if it wasn't IBM that got this patent, but somebody who would use it more like a sword? What if IBM in ten years changes their policy and starts to use patents for attacking? What if IBM indeed intends to use it as a weapon against somebody?
I think most of the aggression here was pointed against the patent office and not IBM in particular. The patent system has just become one big machinery who's main goal seems to be to sustain itself and all the lawyers working with patent issues. It simply doesn't protect and promote innovation anymore the way it was meant to, at least not in the fields of software and business models.
"generates [a] customized Web site without the Web site creator writing any HTML or other programming code"
:)
:)
that doesn't only apply to system software because web server/database/scripts with browser forms as an input interface does exactly as explained above for the user.
even more so with flash sites
that don't need a bloat of frames
or to reload a whole layout of content
each time you click a button..
"This was submitted to the USPTO on June 19, 1998 -- surely someone out there knows of prior art for this?"
i sure hope so..
dynamic sites with admin tools
have been around for a whole bunch of years..
/// evilloop.com
People should stop complaining when organisations do what they are designed to do - namely make money (in the Patent Office's case, this means granting as many patents as possible). Don't bitch about the RIAA when they push for freedom-curtailing laws - THEY DON'T CARE - their job is to protect the interests of those who pay their salaries. Don't bitch when a for-profit corporation exploits dumb laws to increase their profit margins - THEY ARE DESIGNED TO DO THAT.
Every time a story about a company doing something irresponsible or evil gets posted on Slashdot, somebody invariably makes this argument. "Don't blame them! They're just trying to make a profit!" Apparently the idea is that anyone who's trying to make money is exempt from any moral responsibility whatsoever. I've never heard a good explanation for why this is supposed to be true. In fact I've never heard any explanation for it; some people just assume that the profit motive is enough to justify any misdeed, as long it stops short of breaking an actual law.
Abusing the system by filing frivolous patents is wrong. Yes, there should be a law against it, but the fact that there isn't doesn't mean that the people who do it shouldn't be criticized.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
It's been a while, but I've been building web based applications since 1994. Many of these were template based. I still have source code w/ dated versioning information from mid '1996. I'm quite sure that the amount of "prior art" for this sort of system is quite extensive.
Evolution: love it or leave it
I used back in 1995 when I did my first page generated all kinds of basics in HTML 2.0. You didn't need to write a single line of HTML to make a webpage with it.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
We can't be pissed that they applied for the patent and still say that they're better than most companies in the computer biz, cause you can't have both. If Microsoft were to release a few open source apps, would that make them an open source friendly copnany? Make no mistake: IBM is a corporation too (a big one at that) and will do whatever it can to increase shareholder value, even if that means switching strategies whenever its convenient.
C'mon guys, this is clearly an attempt at a joke by IBM. Someone should be patting 'em on the back say 'nice one!', not getting their feathers ruffled over pure BS.
And someone should be getting fired over at the PO right about now, maybe a few supervisors, and realistically a whole division needs to be axed. If you ain't any brighter than the keyboard you're typing with, pick it up and bash yourself over the head with it 'til you are. Christ, those guys are all college grads, what would Einstein be thinking right now?
Super fool
The small newspaper I work at received a nasty-gram from a law firm implying that our web site may be violating a lame patent about user-updatable web pages. I think our response was to ignore it.
It was called existence on my old ISP, used %%TAGS%% to allow SSI + More ==> Templates...
But I can't prove it think of a way to prove it.
Maybe I can dig up an addition date to a perl links page.
Nick Lange nick.lange@SPAMTASTIC.hushmail.com
Its short, but oh so true. IBM have NOT patented what FrontPage do. They have patented a template based method to create alternative pages for browser specific functions. Read the whole patent pepole.
Mod parent up, please.
...um...like...a sig...
I believe the original NCSA httpd delivered some templates for producing HTML but not sure. :)
Looked on sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/www/converters for old code. (sunsite's been a linux host since '93 at least - or at least that's how long I've been using it
t2htmll.tgz - Aug 29 1997
webtex-0.96.tar.gz - May 29 1997
info2www-1.2a.tar.gz - Mar 2 1997
What this suggests to me is there's a lot of prior art. I'm using sunsite as an example as it's dating is fairly accurate btw.
Check perhaps postgresql95, MySQL, NCSA HTTPD-1.0 (perhaps), and maybe even original Netscape server and Netscape composer - circa '95 IIRC.
But I think the best connection is TeX/LaTeX WWW formatters which probably first came into existance in '92-93 when the physicists developed WWW. After all TeX is fairly common for documentation under unix...
If I see ONE MORE FREAKING WASTE OF BANDWIDTH that only has the message, "I HAVE PRETTY CAT LOOK PICTURE!"...
The average person doesn't need a website.
Of course a lot of things need to be put in place to determine who the competing company should be, what information they should receive and how to "judge" the result.
However I'm pretty sure nobody would try to patent the obvious anymore! :)
a device whereby air is inducted into a vessel, which then combines the air with any other element or combination of elements via a chemo-biological reaction.
;)
I'm a nasty son of a b*tch - if I get this patent I'm going to make it cost millions for anybody using it - so... you all better find an alternative to breathing pretty darn quick
thank you.
Also, I think NTL [ntl.com] were also offering something similar, bu otI can't find it on their site right now
First hardrive problems, now this. Where will they go next?
The novel idea discovering process was :
Goto BounteyQuest.com and sign up. This is a site that's set up to help kill patents with existing prior art, and is a sensible, practical, and legal way to help restore some sanity to the patent process.
(It may be argued that the patent issuing process is broken beyond repair, but even if so, a viable alternative has yet to emerge.)
Disclaimer: I have no interest in the above site other than a registered user.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
I remember setting up a website on tripod.com in 1995.
I don't know what their system's like now, but back then you'd get talked through a series of multiple-choice questions that set up your page for you. You just typed in whatever text you wanted, chose a style and away you went!
Surely this patent won't stand?
I wrote somthing that would do this for a cyber caffe in 1997
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
More seriously, I do like the example someone posted of Netscape Gold as prior art. Also, HTML is not really much more than the old troff -mm macros with angle brackets around them, and there were WYSIWYG editors for nroff/troff around in the 80s. And when did Slashdot start? Or web-based conferencing systems? Did any of them predate Bianca Troll's Graffiti Wall? The stuff just ain't new.
* Actually, there was a guy named Eli who worked in the basement who *did* write original JCL, but he was one of those rare wizards. Regular users never touched the stuff.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
IBM isn't a saint thats adopting open source because they are so good and loving.
They adopt it because of the free labour that it provides. At the same time as the individual looses his work (IP rights) big companies like IBM still uses their IPs like trademark and name reqognision.
Individuals and companies plays different games.
I'm all for code sharing but a society there the individual becomes powerless against the big companies will not be a nice one.
The product was called "Pages by Pages", and it was a word processing package for NeXTSTEP. Their "WebPages" product was on the streets around 1993.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"IBM has been awarded US Patent #6,666,666 for software that automatically generates [a] customized Patent without any innovation or other brain demanding work, based on a plurality of pre-stored templates (also known as prior art), old patents, text, fields, and formulas that are then customized through the process of asking the user a few questions."
Actually, it is quite possible that this is a legitimate patent. ....that's how it works. OR they could have conceived of teh idea in 1992...or even earlier....
1. IBM filed in 1998.
2. You need to understand that invention starts when the idea is conceived. If IBM *conceived* of teh idea in, say, 1994, and diligently reduced it to practice from 1994 to 1998, then, then file with the uSPTO,
This is how the process works....all you need is some documentation of when you first conceived of the idea, and some documentation of having diligently reduced it practice in teh intervening time frame between conception and filing.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
In 95/96 when I was working at CompuServe UK, in order to help the content people create their webpages, we wrote a small Visual Basic program which we called SCAMP (Simplified Content Acquisition something something).
/. userid)
That allowed the content people to choose a template from a pre-defined list, and then just enter the text, choose images etc that would go into the template, without touching the HTML at all.
The result would be an HTML page with all of their content pumped into teh template.
And I'm sure we only wrote that because something else gave us the idea for it.
The code will all be sitting in a properly datestamped Sourcesafe database somewhere in CompuServe.
Steve (who can't remember his
There are many old Windows application builders and generators that work in similar way. The user selects database tables and fields to build his application.
Why would this be different for HTML ?
Web application is simply a software application with special output/presentation in the form of HTML. Does it mean that I can separatelt patent application that generates XML, or PDF, etc. ?
CTL+ALT+DEL
What about html2latex.
Arguably, latex is almost programming, but you certainly don't need knowledge of HTML to generate whole sites of documentation. And people have been using this utility for years, certainly I remember seeing some in 94.
Ranulf.
We wrote web template code back in 1995. It was not for users, but for a report writer on a Federal Government Contract. I believe we're talking about something very similar here.
I am a long-time techie (CS Ph.D., worked for Xerox in Palo Alto in 1985 doing Mesa programming) who lives in the DC area now. I know many lawyers types (some in intellectual property specialities). They are clueless about technology and rely completely on the patent's source company for technical details during a prior arts search.
I agree that these are mostly for the "Apple Pie" effect (international IP), stock price bloating, and cannot be enforced in real life.
Bottom line: more make-work for lawyers and clueless in-duhviduals.
This is so long overdue. We need to have a process in which applications for the issue of a patent are presented to the public for review on a web site before the patent is issued so that cases of prior art may be presented. It isn't easy being perfectly vigilant and informed about developments in technology so as to be better able to separate true and legitimate innovations from ridiculous applications, and indeed the USPTO has goofed up too many times to count.
We desperately need better public review as such errors are immensely detrimetal to the advancement of society. This is the only way that the interests of the public can be more effectively protected against the horridly selfish and capitalistic schemes of these corporations.
This one simple, OBVIOUS rule would strike down just about every software patent in existence
Yes, maybe it should, but it DOESN'T. You would be right, and this would indeed be a pointless discussion if we lived in a world where 99% of patents were deemed unenforcable, but that's some other reality.
In this reality, this patent is (at a guess) 80% likely to generate licensing revenue for IBM. Any company that makes a HTML template program, and fears IBM enough to worry that they might enforce this patent WILL pay a licensing fee. IBM is duty bound to it's shareholders to attempt to (a) file this patent and (b) make revenue from this patent.
Yes, it's evil. No, there are no answers. Yes, let's keep talking about it.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Believe it or not, every claim is written as a single sentence because it is required by regulation.
If IBM doesn't use the patent as a sword, then who should care? Nobody. If they start charging royalties for those who "infringe," if they start trying to attack other companies who have since done the same obvious thing, then you can sound the alarms of righteous indignation.
Until then, STFU. Please.
That is exactly the type of ignorance that leads to these sort of problems. "Ehh, don't worry, let them grab all the patents they can. It's no big deal afterall. Let's just STFU until they enforce it and it really becomes a problem beyond our control."
How foolish. While they may apply for a patent just so someone else does not and they do not really intend to enforce it, they are obligated to enforce it or risk losing it. But even if they do not, this error in the issuing of the patent is still detrimental to society because it may discourage others from developing similar technologies, and if they do, these others will have to pay royalties to the patent holder that did hardly any innovation, if at all. So no, shutting TFU is hardly a wise solution. Attack the problem at the root and at the beginning. It is the fool that waits until the house collapses to decide that it is now time to buy termite spray.
What we really need is something that can take this language and render it into much more readable pseudocode.
A much easier task might be to take a Patent Definition Language input and output a legally binding patent! I better go patent this idea straight away...
* I am not a lwayer, but I watched Perry Mason a lot.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
patten was send in '98... ever heard of frontpage '97?
The reason I'm not sure it's "prior art" is that this system asked the web-page writer exactly nothing. They entered the text (one paragraph at a time - the system could also let you pick what style of paragraphing you wanted to view the text with), and they specified the images. Everything else was between the computer and the end-user.
IMHO, this kind of system (where the end-user, NOT the "web developer", gets to choose how the page looks) is superior to the half-baked template systems I've seen since. After all, it's the user who wants the information, not the developer, so why should the developer have any say in the process at all?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They had a wizard, that actually went out and connected to Netscapes site, and you went through a wizard, and then saved the code locally, and voila, you had a web page with out writing a lick of HTML.
when did 3.0 Gold come out?
Look at USPTO # 6,163,779
"Method of saving a web page to a local hard drive to enable client-side browsing"
Granted almost a year ago on December 19, 2000.
Why didn't THAT make the slashdot news?
And finally, for those who think that patents are evil or somehow inappropriate for software, processes, and "obvious" inventions,[hey! he's talking about me!] consider this. There is a 100% direct correlation to a country's GDP, the strength of its intellectual property protections, and the number of patents filed by its citizens.
All dogs have four legs. My cat has four legs, therefore my cat is a dog.
There is a 100% direct correlation between a country's GDP, the number of people who own TVs, and the number of TV shows produced, therefore TV increases your GDP?
There is a 100% inverse correlation between a country's GDP, and the percentage of the population who sleep in mud huts, therefore destroy all mud huts!
A quote from an article on causal reasoning:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Who really cares that IBM has been granted this patent. Do you really think they are going to try and enforce this. If they are going to try and enforce it, they will be in court forever, so there is no point in trying to enforce it.
At the time when IBM came up with this patent, it was probably somewhat of a novel idea. Perhaps you slashdotters do not understand how a research division works at a large company. I have worked for a research division at one of these large companies, and perhaps I can explain it to you.
A group of people in a given department doing research on topic X get together and brainstorm. Out of this brainstorming session comes lots of ideas, perhaps 50 ideas in total. Then people go off and try to find information about these 50 ideas. Usually they look for patents that have already been submitted. Idea X1 has not patent submitted, so personA files a Declaration of Invention. The reason they do this is just in case someone else is thinking of patenting this idea, then the company has a concrete peice of information that this idea has been around before. Next, the person(s) who got idea X1 rolling will talk to their boss, and get him to hook them up with a lawyer to write a formal patent proposal. Sure, in some cases they write their own, it doesn't really matter. Then they file the patent with whatever patent body governs. Then the person(s) involved with the patent sumbitting are very happy, because they just got a bonus from their large company, and their boss put a smiley face beside their name for their year end review. Many companies base raises on number of patent submissions.
Then they wait 3 or 4 years and more than likely forget about it. Out of the millions of patents that are submitted, I would be surprised if more than 500 000 of them are ever even used. For starters, lots of the patent ideas stink to begin with, and some idiot at the patent office let them through. I beleive that most patent officials have no clue, and the real checks on whether the patent is good or not comes at the organizational level of the large company when they try to decide whether they should spend the $30k or so in various fees in order to get the patent submitted.
The department I worked at at a large company had about 20 employees, and each employee probably averaged about 5-15 patent submissions a year. I recall one employee getting a patent filed, and she couldn't even remember what the patent was about. When everyone looked at what the patent was for, everyone laughed at how dumb of an idea it was. I bet IBM is doing the same right now, laughing over coffee at how funny it is that this idea became an actual patent.
Because the patent process is sooooo slow, it makes the majority of patent submissions useless. A good patent submission is when you find an idea so unique that in 3 years, there will still be very few people that would even consider it, let alone file a patent for it. And it has to give such substantial gains over whatever is currently used that everyone will want to jump on the bandwagon and use it. Or the other option is to get your patents into standards, because then people are forced to use it. This in fact happens quite a bit, and usually the large companies build products to follow these standards, so Company A trades 5 patents to Company B for their 3 better patents, every one is even steven, and they go along their merry way.
Anyway, there yah have it.
I started up my Cold Fusion. It has a copyright notice of 1995 - 1999 (so, I haven't upgraded recently.)
Also, the patent description seems to be intimating that this autodetects browsers... We did that in CF before 1998, too.
I worked at Ittsy Bittsy Machines in the early 90's. I thought initially the security (no offices had windows, no office had a door that faced a window) was for the protection of IBM's lauded secrets, then I realised that this was not so... it was to make sure the World was protected from the fact that IBM was 25 years behind the times.
yeah there's been a prior art... it's called CGI!!! do these guys at the patent office do any research at all???
Hey, excellent plan! Exactly what we did when they passed the DMCA, and now when they're trying to pass the SSSCA - 'Nobody's actually been *charged* for any crimes here, so who cares?!?!'
And what then when it DOES happen? What if IBM goes lawsuit happy? You need to address the problem at the source, not wait for it to maybe possibly someday cause some damage.
do not read this line twice.
Don't know what happened to post here, it seems to have vanished, but....
The USPTO can't lose in issuing bad patents. If you want to appeal a pattent it'll cost you a few grand. Just write your check out to the USPTO.
On the other hand a patent doesn't protect the owning part from acts of infrigment. They still have to take the supposed infringer to court where the court can find the patent was wrongly issued.
All the USPTO is doing in issuing such patents is weaking it's value and the respect it should get.
In fact I'd go as far as to say it is showing signs of corruption with the can't lose status.
Sill I would like to know what happened to my first post here.
IBM has a policy of encouraging it's employees to earn as many patents as possible. It's a source of promotion at IBM, in fact. It gives the company something to put on the quarterly report. That's not to say that they're useful patents though, and I can't recall IBM ever trying to enforce any of their "weak" patents in the past 10 years. I don't think they'll start now. And I really don't think they'll come after Linux programmers for this given the direction of the company right now.
Publishing is not a requirement.
Showing that you did it prior to the patent application and award dates is all that is required.
Here's a famous example:
Marconi held the patents on radio, it was shown that Tesla had come up with a more sophisticated (as in a voice device) that was shown at the World's Fair some time before Marconi had even sent his telegraphy signal for the first time. Tesla didn't pursue his device because he was working on something "better" in his mind than hertzian wave radio. Marconi's patent on radio was then subsequently revoked.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Please voice your complaints here...
usptoinfo@uspto.gov
Let them know that this bulls**t has got to stop!
The proliferation of "HTML" wizards that produce totally unreadable pages or pages that require you to use their browzer only is a total crock. Maybe this will slow things down a bit.
Someone please mod this up
My friend Kurt and I built what is now Broderbund's Photo Library product. It had the ability in '97 to create a web site from photo selections. You went through a wizard where you chose which parts of the web UI you wanted to have (like gallery, thumbnails, comments, color selections, etc). So i got yer prior art right here...
Just an idea to avoid the patent.
I do agree. Mod this up!
How is this different from pateneting XML + XSLT?
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
It would be some amazing trick to offerflow a buffer in a process executing as a normal user and get a root shell.
This is actually frequently done, mind you.
That is exactly why it is called a "root exploit".
Our client wanted to be able to post reports that were output from the software to the web. Our head programmer put a very rudimentary web template system in place that would output reports with choices of sort order, gawd-aweful background colors (from a 16 color palett), and customized headings and footers. This was all done without the user having to know any HTML. You can see samples here dating back to 1997.
The About SCORE page even references automated HTML authorship. From the page:
SCORE (Scheduling Classes with Order Reliability and Efficiency) is an application developed by a group of Computer Science students enrolled in the Software Engineering sequence at Ball State University. SCORE is an application that is a flexible scheduling advisor for use by faculty involved in the creation of course offerings by a department. SCORE has features which allow for powerful schedule reporting, class conflict catching and reporting, persistent and consistent data retieval and automated HTML authorship of documents for Internet/Intranet display.
Though ugly, I think these qualify as prior art and beat IBM's 1998 application.
Nah ... original post was way more interesting.
During the IBM/Microsoft divorce, IBM was supposidly able to drop a big, thick pile of patents on the table to prevent Microsoft from really shafting them.
Didn't IBM have a software patent way back on using the TAB key to move between fields in software? They never charged anyone for that one.
Netscape composer, used it in 1997, I'm very sure... but yours would be better...
Bizar technology?
Compuserve released an HTML wizard tool back in 1995.
IBM is the single largest patent holder in the US, and 99% of their patents are held for defensive reasons. They could probably sue every tech company in this country based the patents that they hold, but they do not.
Why not? Because it would engender ill will and the patents they hold give them leverage in deal making.
So IBM tries to patent everything they ever thinkn of, trivial or not, so that other (less profitable, innovated and ethical) companies can't sue them.
-nd
Uh, what world are you living in? If the cost to any individual company of paying up is less than the cost of fighting it in court, the company has a duty (to its shareholders) to pay up.
Nobody's going to take a stand against this, unless IBM picks the wrong targets.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
IBM playing the game is exactly what's wrong here. If I go online, buy 1,000,000 shares of penny stock X and talk it up in some business chatrooms, then sell it off after it goes up $.20, I go to jail. It's called Pump and Dump. IBM talks up a technology it owns, then after people start using it, oh hey, look at this... I patented it 10 years ago.
As for talking to congress. HA! Can you say lobbiest groups. Sorry, but I could harvest all my organs, the organs of my entire family, sell all my worldy possesions, and I wouldn't come near being able to compete with a lobbiest. What about honest politicians... sure, I'm sure there are some. Not nearly enough though. Definatly not enough to overturn some kind of vote. Add to that piggy-backing and other political tactics. They toss my beautiful bill onto a law package allowing for child pornographers more freedoms to peddel their smut and look, my bill is in the dump again.
The game is the deal here. We are not playing a game. We are just amusing our-selves with idle chit-chat while others play us in the game.
TIBCO PortalBuilder, which was the initial engine for My Yahoo! and is used by private firms for personalised customer web services.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I was on the team that wrote the content management system used by cnn.com. It included a templated-page generation system that was completed in early 96. A patent, huh? considering that everybody has produced a cms these days (even micro$oft), you're just a little late...
I don't know if all this would be sufficient prior art, but I (caveat: IANAL) think it would invalidate the patent.
I commonly used templates to generate websites for customers way back when.
The idea, software, and everything was my own. I did not think it was revolutionary.. more like 'obvious'.
Visual tools make modifications as simple as dragging-and-dropping.
...
- Drag-and-drop hyperlink editing
Desktop publishing features create professional-looking results.
...
- Hide HTML code with WYSIWYG editor
- Create "hotspots" on images with clickable image editor
- Add interactive forms with just a few mouse clicks
WebBots (tm) eliminate programming tasks while Web Wizards guide you through the creation process.
Built in WebBots let you:
...
- Create bulletin boards for threaded discussion groups
- Save information from fields automatically
Web Wizards simplify the development of:
- External Web sites
- Internal Web sites for corporate information distribution
Select from over twenty page templates or create your own.
So is this prior art or what?
sulli
RTFJ.
They're in the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle - I'll bet they'll find this quite interesting.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Constitutional basis for federal patent and copyright systems is to be found in the Constitution of the United States Article 1, Section 8, clause 8 which states:
... to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. "
... "
"Congress shall have power
Federal patent laws have existed since 1790. The first United States Patent Act, that of 1790 was a short act of seven sections only entitled "An act to promote the Progress of Useful Arts". Under its terms any two of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War and the Attorney General were empowered to grant patents for terms of up to fourteen years for inventions that were "sufficiently useful and important" provided that the grantee submitted a specification describing the invention (and where appropriate a model thereof) to the Secretary of State at the time of the grant.
In 1793 this act was repealed and replaced by a slightly longer act, the drafting of which is largely attributed to Thomas Jefferson, who was at the time Secretary of State and therefore intimately involved in the administration of the 1790 Act. The Act is notable for its definition of what constitute patentable subject matter in the United States, which definition is almost unchanged up to now:
"any new and useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter and any new and useful improvement on any art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter."
In the same year the Supreme Court in Grant v. Raymond made it clear that failure to provide an adequate description of the invention was a ground under which a defendant might use when sued for patent infringement, it being held that
"as a preliminary to a patent a correct specification and description of the thing discovered (was required). This is necessary in order to give the public, after the privilege shall expire, the advantage for which the privilege is allowed and is the foundation of the power to issue the patent
A major review of the law was undertaken in 1836 in response to complaints about the grant of patents for things that lacked novelty. Under this revision the Patent Office was set up as part of the State Department and a specification had to be submitted to it and be examined for novelty before a patent would be granted. As a consequence of this provision of the 1793 Act requiring the inventor to distinguish his invention from the prior art was expanded upon to require the applicant to "particular specify and point out the part, improvement or combination, which he claims as his own invention or discovery".
Nowhere in there do I see anything about being designed to make money.
What I do see is that the Patent Office was set up to ENSURE sufficient novelty in those items submitted for patenting. If it fails in this IT IS FAILING IN THE ONE THING IT WAS DESIGNED TO DO!
They still have the original article on-line here.
First, IANAL, yada yada yada.
Second: Most patent systems throughout the world are based on first application. This means that in, say, Austrailia, I can file a patent for something I invented, even if someone else invented it earlier. This is what one of my professors did when he finished a research project (bioengineering stuff--not genetics but something else) and found it was already patented in the U.S. The USPTA doesn't work like that. They care about who invented something first, which is why they have the whole prior art search. However, the reason why something like FrontPage '97 doesn't necessarily count as contradictory prior art is that the file date has very little to do with anything. The invention date is what matters. And how is that invention date proven? Through the use of very, insanely formal engineering notebooks that get notorized on a daily basis.
So what does this mean? Well, IBM engineers could have come up with something like this years ago, let's say during the HTML 1.0 era. At this point, it wasn't really an obvious thing to do. They have the notorized notebooks saying, "yeah, they made this up way back when." IBM then takes those notebooks and drops them off with any prior art that they are aware of (that really only needs to be from before when they invented it), and let the patent office do their thing.
Why did they wait until 1998 to file this? I don't know. Maybe some other company was trying to get a patent on it and they said, "hold it. We did this first." In which case this is a good thing. It doesn't seem like this is the sort of patent IBM is going to use litigiously. They'd have to bring down hundreds of companies, and that wouldn't make them too popular.
So let's all calm down and save our vitriol for the truly tragic cases of the patent system gone wrong, like the guy who invented the intermittant windshield wiper, had the idea stolen by Detroit, and spent 10 years in court suing the hell out of the car companies. And going insane. That was a big problem. This? Someone needs to stop reading Adbusters.
I speak seven different body languages fluently, including ToughGuy and Swinger.
I think CNet came up with PRISM years before that, and it is a template based language. It is now sold as StoryServer.
Only 'flamers' flame!
I'm serious.. I came up with a concept quite similar to that almost a year ago, and have been working on it since. I don't really have anything I want to show yet, but I do have a working model. Take into consideration that I had to learn several new things to get started, not to mention my inability to motivate myself ;)
What if I wanted to take my idea to the market, and make some money with it? Would IBM feed me a shaft, or what? What can I do about it?
-kidlinux.
IBM became a major investor of NetObjects a few years ago. NetObjects Fusion allowed pages to be created off of one main template. I know NOF was around before the IBM partnership, but did they get a patent in exchange for their investment? The patent involved sounds like it was.
NetObjects closed on August 1 and just recently sold their products to Website Pros and the patent rights to Macromedia.
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
Ummm, it's slashdot. What do you think?
sulli
RTFJ.
I'm not legally minded but
The templates preferably correspond to different types of Web pages and other features commonly found on or available to Web sites.
Does this not allow the patent to cover new features just because there common?
Does this effect things such as JSP, XSL?
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
To pick a nit:
There are two things that patents do:
let you sue someone who copies you
Actually, patents allow you to sue not only those who copy you but anyone who independently invents the same thing that you did. There is no requirement that somebody have copied, or indeed even have been aware of the invention or patent, for that person to be sued.
This is the real evil of patents: You could be infringing on one right now and not know it. We frequently have to deal with this where I work, as we discover that systems we spent years writing may have been illegal because of a patent we never heard of on a product that never made it to market half a dozen years ago.
Patents don't just prevent copying. They prevent re-invention.
--G
Prior art to 1998 of HTML templates would be, to name a few:
-Netscape Composer
-Geocities web page creation tools
-Erols Internet had a web site creator back in 1995 when I first got on line after getting married.
I'm pretty sure Front Page Express predates 1998 and it inserts HTML, HEAD, BODY data into new pages like Netscape Composer.
What a lousy attempt at a patent.
Its still around on the net too...it about 6mb and created a complete site with options....circa 1996
For a patent to be valid it has to be non-obvious to a practitioner of the relevant field".
:-)
Since this is totally obvious to anyone who has ever used such primative junk as dBase IV, indeed the dBase IV code generator could be easily modified to do this, the "patent" is worthless.
If I was an IBM shareholder, I'd be seriously p*ssed at the pointless wasting of dosh.
If a US tax payer, I'd be asking what the "patent examiners" were doing, when they should have been doing what they are paid to do.
Even if this patent happened to stand in the USA, it wouldn't work elsewhere, so you can write your sript+templates jobbie in another country, and then make it accessable to the US by putting it on a web site
I knew of a guy who had a script that generated a webpage for a user without writing any code. I never took a look at the script, but this was back in 1994....
You should violate some patents,
Before some pantents violates you.
Will work for bandwidth
"In the meantime, the rest of us will enjoy the fruits of an economy created by companies that work and a government that protects their work."
Pity IBM in this case DIDN'T DO THE WORK! I guess then you won't mind the patent being overturned when any one of a billion pieces of prior art are brought up?
Corporate apologists like you disgust me. I don't know whether you're blinkered by your simple-minded faith in capitalism, or are simply being cynical twats. Either way, you need to get your collective heads on straight. A corporation, doing any dirty thing it can manage for money, is not somehow an "honorable" or "right" thing. It is not something we can expect, and it is not a success we must depend on. I for one would as rather live in a country built on the financial misdeeds of a megacorp, than I would live in a country built on any other sort of crime, like genocide.
Oh wait, I live in a country built on both... damn.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Only to mindless reactionary dittohead morons like you who are to busy beating off to your tapes of G. Gordon Liddy's old radio show to try anything resembling coherent thought. The rest of us understand the concept of logical fallacies, and why the large number in the starter of this thread made it another load of Score: 5 shit.
Gimme a break.. I was sure that I invented this sometime in oh I dunno 1996...
Anyone else invent it?, cause if not, I am sueing...
It doesn't seem that this generates HTML based on templates like you would in MS Frontpage or other HTML authoring software, but that it generates the code on the server based on what the user's browser is capable of. At least that's the way it seems after reading the first few pages of the patent. Now I'm trying to remember when the first sites that could detect if you were using Netscape or IE came around.
This patent could potentially be very useful because web pages could be generated based on preferences that you specify. If you don't like having Java enabled then perhaps a CGI version of a web app is available, and the server will generate HTML code for this, with little hassle to the user. This could also be used for viewing a news website on your PDA or PC with little hassle to the webmaster. Just one story put up on the website, and voila, everyone on every platform can view the story.
Apart from the really stupid stuff, I wrote such a thing back in spring 1995 in C which does more or less exactly that. A little program that put a template around a piece of text and published it. Used it to have three different "themes" on my webpages. One for people who had Netscape 3, one for people who used IE and one for people who liked it all text. I demonstrated this to some people who had me in for a job interview and then rejected the job offer. So besides from everyone who knows me and the stuff behind the pages, besides binaries dated back from that time, I can possibly also dig up the people who were there getting the demonstration. And oh, by the way, this was all in Norway.
Cheers
Please do read the entire patent before you do shoot the usual patent rant as you did, then you will find this text, which explains it: FIELD OF THE INVENTION The invention relates to a Web site creation tool that enables Web site to be created with the capability to identify a user's particular interface.
---
Jobless in Munich
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
This is one of those catch-22 stories, something which makes me simultaneously dislike and love the prospects.
:)
I am one who believes that software patents are bad with three M's and a silent Q. I mean, the base concepts aren't too original, so what's the point of issuing 28-year patents on things which, within less than a quarter of that term, are so behind the SOTA (State Of The Art) that everyone and their granny could think of it and possibly code it if they (a) were technically capable and (b) otherwise unencumbered by it.
That's the dislike part.
Now the love parts.
First off, IBM's investments in one of our favorite offspring from the fount of the Open Source, Linux, is rather impressive. Most of their hardware runs exceedingly well on Linux, and probably BSD as well (though that's not what I personally use often.. it's good in ultra-security apps, though...)
Second, it allows Big Blue ammunition to attack our Great Satan And Enemy Of Everything We Love, Microsoft.
This is a potential legal matchup that makes Vegas bookies drool in anticipation, like the matchup between two undefeated boxers or the ALCS. (Granted, Seattle has a bit of an advantage IMHO, but (a) they were wiped by the Yanks last year and (b) their power probably is an extention of Redmond's satanic verses... )
Iff Big Blue wins, it's more money to (potentially) feed into the Linux R&D pool. Iff Microsoft wins, it still loses a lot of legal fee money and IBM gets one less patent in its portfolio.
Choices, choices, choices..
Doesn't affect me, though. I use echo to code html
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
If it was reviewed in early 1996, it was created long before that. It is a robust Word/Frame to HTML converter that lets you define templates in HTML that translate from Word styles or Frame tags. You do not have to create a line of HTML using that product. See one review:
t ml
http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/reviews/0205/thtml.h
An IBM lawyer pressing a court case on this patent would qualify as "court jester."
...content. Like a CGI and Perl scripts that generate custom webpages by asking for a username and password dynamically. Can I copyright the letter chain I-B-M? Can I copyright how to walk? Oops, sorry, I've gotta cut this rant short. I've gotta patent my DNA before I lose my rights to myself.
Oh yeah, this messageboard and userlogin perl script violate IBM's new patent, they will be mailing you in the morning with a legal complaint.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
...so no one can use them without your permision. That ought to get the governments attention. :P
Haven't they heard of NetStudio? now those are what i call some templates; as an artist, i want templates (and not to have to pay royalties to ol blue) and i want the ability to modify those templates and my web graphics at will since i did fork over the $99 bucks (ok, cheap compared to Photoshop, but...)for NetStudio's easy web graphics software. Take that IBM! if y'all wanna see what i'm talkin about, click here: this product will make your web life easier...AND you won't have to pay no stinkin royalty.
I feel sick to see so many ppl talk about what they did when .... Reading the first 4 comments made me think that "we" (me included) are to arrogant...
Funny, Ibrought Micrographics Picture Publisher 8 (as part of the Wetricity 2 suite) in 1998 and it can do all this.
Comes standard with something like 30 templates.
And...this was the second version, I think PP7 also had these features.
IBM owns the patent???!...patently rediculous!