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Liquid Audio Sues In Pitiful Attempt to Appear Relevant
Emily writes: "Another case
of patent abuse similar to the PanIP nonsense previously reported in Slashdot. This time, it's Liquid
Audio suing geotargeting company Infosplit
over patent infringement. I read their patent,
it's hilarious! Liquid Audio basically received a patent for saying that a domain ending by "co.uk" is in the UK. More seriously, these lawsuits
represent a serious threat to innovation in this country."
Territorial determination of remote computer location in a wide area network for conditional delivery of digitized products
Abstract
Digital products are delivered to a client computer through a wide area network such as the Internet only upon determination that the client computer is located in a geopolitical territory, such as a country or state, for which delivery of the digital product is authorized.
A server computer estimates the geopolitical location of the client computer from the client computer's network address through contact information in a network address allocation database.
Alternatively, the server computer estimates the geopolitical location of the client computer from the client computer's custom name, e.g., domain name. The domain name itself can specify a country within which the client computer is located. Such can be conventional or can be parse according to ad hoc patterns developed by large, international organizations identified by a root domain name. In addition, contact information for the domain name can be retrieved and geopolitical territory information parsed from the contact information. A super-classification of the domain name can indicate a geopolitical territory. Records associating geopolitical territories with network address ranges are stored in such a manner that maximizes resolution within a cache of such records, perhaps at the expense of reduce efficiency but so as to maximum currency and accuracy.
It almost sounds like they patented the use of somebody else's leg work
[sigh]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Well, it looks they'll have plenty of people to sue if this is possible. Analog also extracts the server's likely country of origin by parsing a resolved IP address, as do hundreds of other applications.
It's hardly a big deal to equate a TLD to a country, and whilst it may take a little longer to map IP addresses to geographic locations, this data is already in the public domain!
Actually had to write something like this where we were limiting access to people from some other areas. What I did was a traceroute then check thier IP address, the two before thier address, and 2 random ones to see if thier were in the forbidden list.
If any were in the list they were restricted access. The thinking was that while they could forge thier own, chances were they could not forge earlier ones(as easy) and then the random ones on the basis that if they were to go through on of the forbidden areas they were probably forbidden.
If it had been really important would of probably checked all address in thier route, but it wasn't.
Even with that, it was easy to bypass by just connecting to a computer in a legal area, then using that to connect our site. AC because I don't want to be sued.
Their problems aren't entirely their own fault. Read all about it here
Basically, it seems that congress has been using the patent office as a source of income, draining off millions of dollars that would be spend reviewing applications- seems like a good 15-20% of the fees that companies pay aren't used for reviewing applications at all.
I'm not completely relieving the PO of blame, but it's something to think about anyway.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Heh, we have a whole book, called the "guidelines" it's a public publication which you can download from our website (convention, guidelines). Essentially, a novelty destroying document is one which discloses all the features of a claim (or invention) in a single embodiment or example. This can be another patent or any prior publication from anywhere - as long it was public knowledge at some point ;)
Usually we have to challenge inventive step - in this we argue that something isn't inventive because someone skilled in the art (but with no inventive ability) WOULD combine the knowledge of two different documents to arrive at the concept.
I know its dry and boring (as are all legal texts) but iy you get a chance, our guidelines and the European Patent Convention do have some info ;)
Personally I feel a little cheated if (and this is rare) I don't find a set of prejudicial documents during a search ;)
Then I don't work in computing and crap like that.......
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And this is why we employ specialists (usually with PhDs in their field) for a partcular field. Most of us are published.
/. (many years ago) I was a research scientist.
/. questions.
i.e. the cat-flap specialist (and we have some!) won't get quantum mechanical applications. So, yes, we do have quantum physicists here. Ones who have worked at Cern. We also have fully trained, industrially adept biochemists etc etc. Just look at our recruitment requirements (the requirement to speak, read and write technical English, French and German is a toughie)
The USPTO do have specialists too, however they don't specialise to such a degree - but their main problem is they are given no time for a search due to workload. Together with a shit approach to software patents it's true.
So we don't make arbitraty judgements, people are hired to fit the niche they know and are specialists in and we are encouraged (conferences etc) to remain fully up to date in our field of expertise. When I joined
Troc
PS (again) to anyone like Rob... if you want to organise a Q&A session I will happily answer the
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
because the US patent system has some real flaws
Such as the fact that it's in the best interest of lawmakers to encourage numerous patent filings (regardless of legitimacy) because the Office of Management and Budget can shuffle funds from the patent filing fees (which are supposed to hire and support engineers, scientists, researchers, etc. to verify claims) into the general fund. Worse, there's little oversight since none of the fees are taxpayer dollars so they fall under the radar. When you need some extra cash for your pet project this sort of thing is great.
How much money are we talking about? The USPTO receives zero taxpayer dollars -- its entire budget is based on its fees. The fees amount to $710 to file an application, $1,240 due at issuance, followed by periodic maintenance fees of $850 due 3-1/2 years post-issue, $1,950 at seven years, and $2,990 at year 11. These fees are reduced by about half for independent inventors and small companies.
The fees are supposed to nearly exactly track the actual costs of maintaining patents and paying researchers. However, when Congress can freely dip into the pool for cash it's not hard to see why they resort to retarded monkeys that wouldn't know prior art if it crawled up their ass and died.
Which simply can't be done....if it could be, there'd be only one white pages, not the dozen or so that are available here in LA.
I wonder if these people ever read any of the stuff at the XTraceroute page http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d3august/xt/ or whether they read the RFCs mentioned http://rfc.net/rfc1712.html and http://rfc.net/rfc1876.html
Seems like they are just reinventing the wheel but calling it seomthing new and marketable. Typical.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE