Posted by
michael
on from the patent-office-fails-the-turing-test dept.
gondaba writes "The US Patent and Trademark Office has
granted an all-encompassing patent to ActiveBuddy that covers every step of
IM botmaking technology. According to internetnews, ActiveBuddy now plans to
enforce
the patent, even though the existence of prior art is well-known and documented."
documented? i'd say.
by
MORTAR_COMBAT!
·
· Score: 5, Informative
IRC.net documents advanced bots in 1994, let alone earlier, cruder bots which had been in use.
Bots are heavily in use in the corporate infrastructure, from auto-reply bots which answer emails based on formatting (think: subscribing to majordomo or even old NSI DNS requests), to complete bots which can answer "what color is the sand on Mars".
there should be stiff punishments for abusing the system like this, otherwise, what's to stop them? the only thing which gets hurt is their public image, and frankly that's not enough. I'm not talking prison terms, I'm talking stiff fines for such blatant misuse of the USPTO, to fund a future technical review board for the USPTO.
-- MORTAR COMBAT!
Instant Prior Art
by
signe
·
· Score: 5, Informative
While I was working at AOL, someone (employee) had an IM bot running. It performed such tasks as giving out stock quotes when asked, and doing translations between a few languages. Seeing as this patent of ActiveBuddy's was filed *after* I left AOL, I'm fairly certain that they're shit outta luck.
Yeah, there weren't many IM bots out there, but there were a few. And one is all it takes.
-Todd
--
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
My company in 1998, Activerse, developed a product called the "DingBot SDK" for creating interactive IM response Bots like those ActiveBuddy claims a patent on. It worked in our own (all-Java, radically peer-to-peer, web-services-like) IM/Presence system, but featured an API specifically designed to allow multi-IM-system bots.
We demoed an early version of the product at the "Demo 98" conference, in February 1998. PCWeek ran an article about us mentioning the DingBot SDK later that month.
The Activerse press release announcing the product's general availability, in November 1998, is still available at the Internet Archive.
ActiveBuddy was founded in March 2000. So, not only were their "IM bots" a old idea by the time they filed their patent (August 2000), a ripoff of both Activerse's offerings and more than a decade of practice on IRC networks and in MUDs/MOOs, but their very name was derivative of an existing player in the same market ("Activerse"->"ActiveBuddy") and their main product (an SDK/server) and business model (licensing) mimicked Activerse as well.
Their founder claims with a straight face "we invented interactive agents" and "I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed. I'm certainly not aware of any." That only goes to show you have to be *studiously* ignorant and/or dishonest in order to effectively twist the flaws of the software patent system to personal advantage.
(Postscript on Activerse: It was acquired by high-flying internet conglomerate CMGI in April 1999. Though the initial aim was to expand and promote the Ding IM/bot products throughout the CMGI network of compnaies, as CMGI itself unravelled, Activerse was dismantled through a series of mostly arbitrary and faddish organizational moves which completely ignored the promise of the growing IM space.)
Slashdot Mirror
IRC.net documents advanced bots in 1994, let alone earlier, cruder bots which had been in use.
Bots are heavily in use in the corporate infrastructure, from auto-reply bots which answer emails based on formatting (think: subscribing to majordomo or even old NSI DNS requests), to complete bots which can answer "what color is the sand on Mars".
There's even a Wired article about IRC bots.
there should be stiff punishments for abusing the system like this, otherwise, what's to stop them? the only thing which gets hurt is their public image, and frankly that's not enough. I'm not talking prison terms, I'm talking stiff fines for such blatant misuse of the USPTO, to fund a future technical review board for the USPTO.
MORTAR COMBAT!
While I was working at AOL, someone (employee) had an IM bot running. It performed such tasks as giving out stock quotes when asked, and doing translations between a few languages. Seeing as this patent of ActiveBuddy's was filed *after* I left AOL, I'm fairly certain that they're shit outta luck.
Yeah, there weren't many IM bots out there, but there were a few. And one is all it takes.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
We demoed an early version of the product at the "Demo 98" conference, in February 1998. PCWeek ran an article about us mentioning the DingBot SDK later that month.
The Activerse press release announcing the product's general availability, in November 1998, is still available at the Internet Archive.
ActiveBuddy was founded in March 2000. So, not only were their "IM bots" a old idea by the time they filed their patent (August 2000), a ripoff of both Activerse's offerings and more than a decade of practice on IRC networks and in MUDs/MOOs, but their very name was derivative of an existing player in the same market ("Activerse"->"ActiveBuddy") and their main product (an SDK/server) and business model (licensing) mimicked Activerse as well.
Their founder claims with a straight face "we invented interactive agents" and "I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed. I'm certainly not aware of any." That only goes to show you have to be *studiously* ignorant and/or dishonest in order to effectively twist the flaws of the software patent system to personal advantage.
(Postscript on Activerse: It was acquired by high-flying internet conglomerate CMGI in April 1999. Though the initial aim was to expand and promote the Ding IM/bot products throughout the CMGI network of compnaies, as CMGI itself unravelled, Activerse was dismantled through a series of mostly arbitrary and faddish organizational moves which completely ignored the promise of the growing IM space.)