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."
Over and over again...
by
kawika
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Isn't there some way that the Patent Office could open up this process so that the prior art could be waved in front of them before the patent is granted and expensive lawyers have to be called in to resolve the issue?
I'm thinking the USPTO could create a database of pending patents on their web site that have passed initial muster with the investigator and are likely to be approved. Interested parties could go and post links about prior art (or earlier filed but still pending patents) for the patent investigator to review.
In a word, yes:
by
FreeUser
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
They have an opportunity to earn money thanks to stupid patent laws and they try to take advantage of it.
Yes, I can and do blame them.
Human beings are expected to have ethics, and to treat one another with a semblance thereof even when the law doesn't manage to anticipate every possible permutation of human interaction, or indeed, even when the law is clearly flawed.
Sub-human filth that lack such ethics and/or use the law to cause deliberate harm to others for their own banal benefit deserve to be treated exactly as what they are: sub-human filth.
Re:In a word, yes:
by
Ironica
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"Human beings are expected to have ethics..."
And that is the heart of a good deal of our social and political conflicts in the US. Human beings are held to higher expectations than corporate entities, and yet, those corporate entities have the same rights as human beings. Note that a person didn't apply for this patent; a company did. If the smaller developers had to go up against an individual, even one with substantial resources, they probably wouldn't be nearly so worried. Corporations can draw on resources that individual humans can't, however. Furthermore, if they lose, the company goes bankrupt, dissolves, and the corporate officers go on about their merry way and try again next year. If it were a person, it would be at least seven years before they could do much of anything again.
As long as corporations can live forever or die without hurting anyone, they are unmotivated to partake in human ethics. The answer seems to be to also remove some of their human-like rights. Of course, can you imagine the corporate lobbying against such legislation?
-- Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
What I find interesting is that they're selling bot-writing tools. I haven't seen too many of those around, so perhaps they'd have been able to patent THAT idea. I really don't see how a company could write tools to make bots and then think there were honestly think there's no prior art. Looks to me like a 'lets see how much we can get away with' ploy. Unfortunately, how much they can get away with is usually: a lot. Of course, I suppose most executives out there don't really know all that much about IP law, and they're just trying to protect their businesses. They have lawyers who file the paperwork and handle the patent application process. And, of course, those lawyers are paid for doing this work. They're also paid for pursuing claims against anyone who infringes the patents, whether the company wins or loses. So.... perhaps we shouldn't question the scruples of this company as a whole so much as the litigating community itself.
-- These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
What the hell is the fundamental difference between an IM bot and an IRC bot?
Or any other bot running within an environment generally used for 2-way (or more) communication?
I wrote a bot in 1990 for christ sake.
Not kidding, work with DDIAL chat systems.
DDIAL ran on Apple IIe with 7 300bps modems.
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..."
As long as they're rewarded...
by
Dark+Paladin
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Ever see a kid in elementary school who steals the lunch money of other kids? Then see that same kid after one of his victims breaks his nose? He's not so keen on stealing money anymore; the cost has become too high.
The same thing exists here with all of these silly software/genetic patents that the Patent Office, accepted by people with the brainpower of rancid jello. For now, they can do it, and it's a proven technique - patent something that already exists, then collect from businesses who know it will cost more to fight than to simply pay.
Sooner or later, one of two things will happen. A) Someone will patent something that others really, really care about, and you'll see an Enron/Worldcom level knee-jerk response (Damn! We must make a law to stop this), or B) they'll finally tackle somebody with enough deep pockets and pissed off attitude to crush a company like this, and set a major legal precident.
Either way, I figure I'll keep coding my stuff, and to hell with people who steal the future.
Patenting Ideas
by
Tall+Rob+Mc
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
To my knowledge, traditional patents are held for the specific invention they detail. However, different implementations of the same invention and improvements on an existing invention are individually patentable and legal. For example, there are multiple types of patented egg beaters (electric with a handle, electric upright, hand-cranked, etc.) Though they all achieve the same end goal, beating an egg, the different implementations are considered different inventions.
A wider example might be flying machines. There are thousands of different types of planes, baloons, helicopters, hangliders, and ultralights but each achieve the same goal by different means. Each has their own style, benefits, drawbacks, and potential uses.
I see the general patenting of auto-IM responders as being similar to patenting the idea of human flight. Though every auto-IM responder may have completely different code, handle events in different ways, and interact with different systems, ActiveBuddy owns the idea. That is bullshit.
I can buy 1000 differnt models of cars, why can't I buy 1000 different models of IM responder if each has its own advantages and disadvantages, efficiency, interface, and style.
I can see the spam of the future....
by
CaffeineAddict2001
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Hello my name Alice!
Nice to meet you Alice.
Nice to meet you too! Have I told you how much I love snack-ums?
I don't care.
I care greatly for snack-ums.
Leave me alone.
Nobody would leave a party with snack-ums!
Is that so?
I don't understand, but I do understand one thing: Snack-Ums are delicious!
You seem a little obsessed with snack-ums carla.
I AM OBSESSED WITH SNACK-UMS!
Re:Can you blame them?
by
Physics+Dude
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
They have an opportunity to earn money thanks to stupid patent laws...
Don't you mean "an opportunity to make money"?
There is a slight difference.:)
It's a symptom, not the problem.
by
Fat+Casper
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Every time I see something as retarded as this, I want every last moron at the USP&TO taken out back and shot.
Unfortunately, they're not the real problem. We need some real dust-off-the-Constitution kind of IP reform.
Unfortunately, that's not the real problem. We need some real get-the-companies-out-of-politics kind of capmaign finance reform.
Until Disney, the **AAs and normal industry turn our government back over to us, we're going to keep having these outrages shoved down our throats. In one of the races in my state, one party is running attack ads claiming that 96% of the other candidate's money is coming from out of state. It doesn't matter to me if it's an "I need funding" issue or an "I'm a corporate whore" issue. It's a backwater district in a tiny state, and it's bought and paid for by corporate interests that have no interest in the state, just in how many seats they can buy for their favorite party.
We have to fix the government before it can fix anything for us.
-- I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Re:Can you blame them?
by
Pxtl
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Hmmm - I wonder if I can sue the US patent office for lost funds in a lawsuit to combat this. Can the US patent office be sued for lost legal fees from carelessly handed-out patents? If so, that might force them to be more careful with throwing those things around.
Press Inquiry to ActiveBuddy
by
program21
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This is the full text of an inquiry I have sent to ActiveBuddy via their Press Inquiries area. ------------- I'm writing you in regards to your recent patent grant for interactive agent technology. In an article at Internet News (http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/ 1446781), Tim Kay is quoted as saying "We invented interactive agents. Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example." I am inquiring as to what research as to prior art was done before submitting a patent request, as the same Internet News article quotes several developers as knowing of 'bots' whose code is freely available and has been since before ActiveBuddy was even a company. Specifically named is the Perl module Net::AIM, timestamped in CPAN as having been originally published on 18-Aug-1999, well prior to your patent application filed on August 22, 2000. The original code of the Net::AIM module, and included with the package at the time, included code for an 'interactive agent', albeit not as complex as the technology your company uses today.
The first line of the patent summary reads as follows: "A method and system for interactively responding to queries from a remotely located user includes a computer server system configured to receiving an instant message query or request from the user over the Internet." This is the very definition of a bot, which is not new technology. A common type of IRC known as Eggdrop, which meets the description offered by the description offered in the patent, has been around since late 1993 (http://www.eggdrops.net/eggdrophistory.html).
My question to you is, what findings did you uncover when researching for this patent, and given the fact that numerous examples of prior art can be shown, do you believe the patent will be enforcable, and if so, how? ------------- I would very much like hear what sort of spin they put on this.
-- This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
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.)
Re:Have to say it...
by
neuroticia
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Incompetence is the PROBLEM and should not be used as the excuse. Yes, it's very hard to have a good knowledge of each field that things are patented in, however those granting the patents should *do the research* that they are supposed to do. It would take what? about 20 minutes of research to determine that prior art exists?
It's the same in EVERY field. It's stupid/negligent to hand out a patent without doing at least minimal research beforehand.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't there some way that the Patent Office could open up this process so that the prior art could be waved in front of them before the patent is granted and expensive lawyers have to be called in to resolve the issue?
I'm thinking the USPTO could create a database of pending patents on their web site that have passed initial muster with the investigator and are likely to be approved. Interested parties could go and post links about prior art (or earlier filed but still pending patents) for the patent investigator to review.
They have an opportunity to earn money thanks to stupid patent laws and they try to take advantage of it.
Yes, I can and do blame them.
Human beings are expected to have ethics, and to treat one another with a semblance thereof even when the law doesn't manage to anticipate every possible permutation of human interaction, or indeed, even when the law is clearly flawed.
Sub-human filth that lack such ethics and/or use the law to cause deliberate harm to others for their own banal benefit deserve to be treated exactly as what they are: sub-human filth.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
What I find interesting is that they're selling bot-writing tools. I haven't seen too many of those around, so perhaps they'd have been able to patent THAT idea. I really don't see how a company could write tools to make bots and then think there were honestly think there's no prior art. Looks to me like a 'lets see how much we can get away with' ploy. Unfortunately, how much they can get away with is usually: a lot. Of course, I suppose most executives out there don't really know all that much about IP law, and they're just trying to protect their businesses. They have lawyers who file the paperwork and handle the patent application process. And, of course, those lawyers are paid for doing this work. They're also paid for pursuing claims against anyone who infringes the patents, whether the company wins or loses. So.... perhaps we shouldn't question the scruples of this company as a whole so much as the litigating community itself.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
What the hell is the fundamental difference between an IM bot and an IRC bot?
Or any other bot running within an environment generally used for 2-way (or more) communication?
I wrote a bot in 1990 for christ sake.
Not kidding, work with DDIAL chat systems.
DDIAL ran on Apple IIe with 7 300bps modems.
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..."
Ever see a kid in elementary school who steals the lunch money of other kids? Then see that same kid after one of his victims breaks his nose? He's not so keen on stealing money anymore; the cost has become too high.
The same thing exists here with all of these silly software/genetic patents that the Patent Office, accepted by people with the brainpower of rancid jello. For now, they can do it, and it's a proven technique - patent something that already exists, then collect from businesses who know it will cost more to fight than to simply pay.
Sooner or later, one of two things will happen. A) Someone will patent something that others really, really care about, and you'll see an Enron/Worldcom level knee-jerk response (Damn! We must make a law to stop this), or B) they'll finally tackle somebody with enough deep pockets and pissed off attitude to crush a company like this, and set a major legal precident.
Either way, I figure I'll keep coding my stuff, and to hell with people who steal the future.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
A wider example might be flying machines. There are thousands of different types of planes, baloons, helicopters, hangliders, and ultralights but each achieve the same goal by different means. Each has their own style, benefits, drawbacks, and potential uses.
I see the general patenting of auto-IM responders as being similar to patenting the idea of human flight. Though every auto-IM responder may have completely different code, handle events in different ways, and interact with different systems, ActiveBuddy owns the idea. That is bullshit.
I can buy 1000 differnt models of cars, why can't I buy 1000 different models of IM responder if each has its own advantages and disadvantages, efficiency, interface, and style.
Hello my name Alice!
Nice to meet you Alice.
Nice to meet you too! Have I told you how much I love snack-ums?
I don't care.
I care greatly for snack-ums.
Leave me alone.
Nobody would leave a party with snack-ums!
Is that so?
I don't understand, but I do understand one thing: Snack-Ums are delicious!
You seem a little obsessed with snack-ums carla.
I AM OBSESSED WITH SNACK-UMS!
Don't you mean "an opportunity to make money"?
There is a slight difference. :)
Unfortunately, they're not the real problem. We need some real dust-off-the-Constitution kind of IP reform.
Unfortunately, that's not the real problem. We need some real get-the-companies-out-of-politics kind of capmaign finance reform.
Until Disney, the **AAs and normal industry turn our government back over to us, we're going to keep having these outrages shoved down our throats. In one of the races in my state, one party is running attack ads claiming that 96% of the other candidate's money is coming from out of state. It doesn't matter to me if it's an "I need funding" issue or an "I'm a corporate whore" issue. It's a backwater district in a tiny state, and it's bought and paid for by corporate interests that have no interest in the state, just in how many seats they can buy for their favorite party.
We have to fix the government before it can fix anything for us.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Hmmm - I wonder if I can sue the US patent office for lost funds in a lawsuit to combat this. Can the US patent office be sued for lost legal fees from carelessly handed-out patents? If so, that might force them to be more careful with throwing those things around.
This is the full text of an inquiry I have sent to ActiveBuddy via their Press Inquiries area./ 1446781), Tim Kay is quoted as saying "We invented interactive agents. Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example."
-------------
I'm writing you in regards to your recent patent grant for interactive agent technology. In an article at Internet News (http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php
I am inquiring as to what research as to prior art was done before submitting a patent request, as the same Internet News article quotes several developers as knowing of 'bots' whose code is freely available and has been since before ActiveBuddy was even a company. Specifically named is the Perl module Net::AIM, timestamped in CPAN as having been originally published on 18-Aug-1999, well prior to your patent application filed on August 22, 2000. The original code of the Net::AIM module, and included with the package at the time, included code for an 'interactive agent', albeit not as complex as the technology your company uses today.
The first line of the patent summary reads as follows: "A method and system for interactively responding to queries from a remotely located user includes a computer server system configured to receiving an instant message query or request from the user over the Internet." This is the very definition of a bot, which is not new technology. A common type of IRC known as Eggdrop, which meets the description offered by the description offered in the patent, has been around since late 1993 (http://www.eggdrops.net/eggdrophistory.html).
My question to you is, what findings did you uncover when researching for this patent, and given the fact that numerous examples of prior art can be shown, do you believe the patent will be enforcable, and if so, how?
-------------
I would very much like hear what sort of spin they put on this.
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
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.)
Incompetence is the PROBLEM and should not be used as the excuse. Yes, it's very hard to have a good knowledge of each field that things are patented in, however those granting the patents should *do the research* that they are supposed to do. It would take what? about 20 minutes of research to determine that prior art exists?
It's the same in EVERY field. It's stupid/negligent to hand out a patent without doing at least minimal research beforehand.
-Sara