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AOL Patents IM
ProgressiveCynic writes "CNet is reporting that AOL has recieved a patent on IM technologies. Specifically, any technology that provides "a network that allows multiple users to see when other users are present and then to communicate with them" is covered. While AOL was a leader in this space the patent was only filed in September 2002."
past "art"?
Dumbass software patents...
I seem to recall applications with names like chat and talk which allowed uses to communicate with anyone logged on at the same time. Do those not count as prior art because the users were all logged onto the same machine, and this patent covers multiple machines networked together? Do terminals hanging off a Vax or IBM mainframe constitute a "network"?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
% finger <user>
% talk <user>
While AOL was a leader in this space the patent was only filed in September 2002.
The article clearly states that the filing was done in 1997, and the patent was granted in Sept 200.
Usually when companies get a stupid unenforcable patent, they go after small helpless companies that can't afford to defend themselves in court. However, this time, AOL has made a mistake. Not only are they not able to prove this is a valid patent in court, any company they sue is likely to have the resources to defend themselves, not to mention these companie's IM software will predate the patent. I'd love to see what happened if AOL decided to try to sue Microsoft over Windows/MSN messenger. It'd be pretty funny.
nems
I remember multi-line BBSs in the early 80's doing this. I think the Citadel systems could do this arround 84.
In rfc1459, dated May 1993, after 4 years of development. Although it is described as a "teleconferencing system", it does sound like it'd match:
/usr/bin/who /usr/bin/write
not to mention ytalk and bbses
A solution to the problem with music today
I know its not what we wanna talk about, but what about Micro$oft Messenger?
I know I dont use it, but someone probably does, and I dont think that micro$oft will like aol doing this
yes, i know all about the finger user and talk user commands, but microsoft has power, wether we like it or not, and might be useful in this situation?
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking - H.L. Mencken
A patent can be filed "post mortem", as long as the person or entity that files for it were the primary (first) inventor. For instance, if AOL can prove that they invented IM before, say, IRC (circa 1987), they have a case.
Only then.
Hey, we are joking now.
Prior art: who/rusers/talk.
This is really a joke of a patent application.
There was a show on swedish television earlier tonight where all the nobel prize winners discussed among many other things intellectual property. One of them said that a patents worth amounts to how much money it will cost to challenge it in court. You probably dont have to be one of the nobel prize winners to realize that but its a good point.
What he didnt say was that it probably works the other way too. A patent left undefended (in case mirabilis and microsoft decides to ignore it) is not worth more than the paper it written on.
MIT's Zephyr.
...35 U.S.C. 102(b)
Why not patent using sounds to alert people? Since normal non-legal poeople aren't allowed to run the legal system, why should non-techies control the IT industry... cough DMCA cough...
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
I hereby officially serve notice that I intend to file an application to patent the technology behind taking a shit. Everyone out there needs to pay up or just explode
It would infringe on my patent for the combination of simple symbols, representing sound parts, into fundemental conceptual building blocks that are then aranged within a formal structure to clearly communicate any and all manner of information. It was granted last week.
I wonder how much I owe AOL in back royalties for all that mudding I did in the 90's?
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
I think you guys missed something: this patent was filed for in 1997, by Mirabilis before AOL acquired them.
For that matter, the patent is not on the chatting, per se, but on monitoring who is on the chat network. That may or may not change anything, but it's not the same as 'write.'
I think ICQ will have a hard time proving that BBSs didn't have the ability to tell you who was online before that, though.
...is filing for a patent on the use of ones and zeros to represent data.
I know lots of things. Most of them are wrong.
Virtual Places is a community co-presense system which is patented (IBM now owns it). =\
Pixels keep you awake!
Ironically, the very thing they bought up was developed before they bought it.
Ha'aretz (Israeli newspaper) has written about this before Cnet. More info available there (In English!).
Hebrew version is also available.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
...state that your invention can be something new, a new use, or an improvement on a previous invention or patent. Instant Messaging is certainly an improvement on any messaging system that everyone is bitching about predating IM's.
No TiVo and no caffeine make me something something...
I doubt that any of their work predates Bitnet or for that matter possibly "PHONE" on decnet. I remember passing messages back and forth on Bitnet long before Compuserve existed.
Of course.... if I remember correctly compuserve first ran on DEC 10's running.... TOPS? Long time ago. They certainly were not the first though.
You can't grep a dead tree.
I remember the Galacticomm or Major BBS systems had an instant message type system for their setups... /page Message.
I know I was using it around the late 80's. May not predate unix stuff but it's another prior art. From what I can tell they are still around too. http://www.gcomm.com/
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
From the descriptions in the story they haven't got a leg to stand on in court, but maybe it's a patent on some particular way to run the servers that makes them more efficient than the prior art. It's possible it is an overbroad patent, none of the earlier stuff was patented because it would have been unpatentable before the patent office decided to just let everything through and let the courts sort it out in the late 80's early 90's. Plus, in the early days of commercial software there were no big guys trying to kill capitalism, so the prior art on trivial things isn't documented anywhere an overworked, underpaid, undereducated and unexperienced patent clerk might look.
But without looking at the patent can we really just assume it's another bad patent?
I know you're all thinking it, but I'm filing it, and it'll always be (legally) my idea.
Doesn't the Guide define USP&TO as "a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes?"
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
You have only one year to file for a patent after first public disclosure.
This HHHAAAASSSSS to be sarcasm, cause nobody could be so ignorant.
MIT had an instant messaging service called Zephyr when I was an undergrad there starting in 1989. And MIT's Project Athena, from which the Zephyr service was developed, started in 1983.
-FP
We had a computer in high school, SYLMAR HIGH in So. California and the first thing we wanted to do is talk to other terminals, what fun!
I think most people would think of this its too obvious. Other schools were using this computer from remote so we could chat with other schools.
One of the gamer dudes wrote a game you could play with others via "chat" so there goes the patent for that!
It's a OBVIOUS use for a computer network of any kind (terminals wired to central system is a network, sort of)
SCREW YOU AOL!!! WE DID IT FIRST!!! HAHAHAHA
talk/who/finger aren't integrated like ICQ, but Broadcast for Macintosh sure is.
Have a look at some screenshots. (the Mac version is up front).
For those unfamiliar with the Chooser, in the upper left you select your tool, in this case Broadcast. Then you select your Zone, in this case departments (automatic buddy lists, you might say...). Then you select your chatee. You double-click the person, type in your message, and click send. If you want to hear back from him, you check the 'receiver' button. If you want to be able to get messages while other programs are runinng (this is late 80's, after all) you click 'Background'. Easy. Simple. Done. Prior art.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Unfortunately people don't read the actual claims, rather they read the abstract or some other part of the patent and draw conclusions about what is covered from this material.
These conclusions are invariably wrong. What a patent covers is described in the claims, and nowhere else. If you don't read the claim, you don't have a clue as to what a patent covers.
Reading the actual claim in this case, it is quite clear that AOL's patent is not affected by prior art such as BBSs chat systems that don't require a communications network. Nor is functionality like Apple's broadcast because the users are tied to specific machines. IRC also relavant as it does not maintain a list of users that you are interested in talking to, an notify you when they go online.
Following is Claim 1, what AOL actually has a patent on:
What is claimed is:
1. A communications system comprising:
a communications network;
a multiplicity of communications terminals which are connectable to said communications network and which can be employed concurrently by multiple seeking users and multiple sought users to communicate via said communications network, wherein each user is identified independently of a given communications terminal address by a unique identification code predefined for said user, which code is independent of which of said multiplicity of communications terminals that user is employing;
a monitor operative to monitor whether or not a user is connected to said communications network; and
an annunciator operative to annunciate to a seeking user, currently connected to said communications network via any of said multiplicity of communications terminals, network connection status information relating to other users who are in a list of sought users which list includes identification indicia of the sought users, which list is defined by and sent by said seeking user without using verbal requests, and for providing to said seeking user the current network address currently assigned to each of said other users for that other user's current connection to said communications network;
a user communication selector enabling the seeking user to establish communication with at least one sought user on said list.
I will admit that one of virtues is sarcasm, in this case I am completely serious. My last comments on the instant messaging subject have probably already been archived, but those that know me know that I believe in strong intellectual property rights especially in the Instant Messaging realm.
I don't see how you could claim I was ignorant, just because AOL got a patent the rightfully deserved.
Ok, I did have some sarcasm. Sort of. AOL didn't file the patent, they paid $2xx million dollars for it. But I still don't have any problem with them having or enforcing it.
-BrentMBBS let you do that very thing back in the late 80's. That would be prior art.
Abstract:
This sig intentionally left justified.
A little hasty in trying to make a point, I guess. The article clearly states up front that the patent application was filed in 1997, not 2002. I shouldn't pick on Timothy, though -- it's clear from the postings that a lot of readers don't bother to read what they are ostensibly replying to. 'chat' is NOT instant messaging. But I digress... Personally, I think if that's what it takes to fend off Micro$oft, then more power to 'em!
You could also say of course unix talk + finger + who, but those are seperate tools. IRC is an integrated chat client/server system that does everything they've patented about IM.
11*43+456^2
"Method of inserting cranium into defecatory orifice of multicellular lifeforms."
Shit. There's at least 536 cases of prior art in Congress, one in Jack Valenti's office, and one in Hilary Rosen's office.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
This is a ridiculously broad patent, and they were definitely not even the first to come up with this sort of thing. This is the kind of invention that any idiot would have come up with given the requisite technology, therefore it should not be patentable. They should only be ably to profit from their software/service that they actually develop, not bogus claims to ridiculously general categories of products that they didn't even invent.
Repeal the DMCA!
Did you actually read the patent? It does a lot of talking about terminals, and doesn't seem to have much to do specifically with IM at all.
Also, this business about praising AOL for creating the original Instant Messaging is a bit much. They may have been the first to call it that, but it's not like they pulled it out of the ether.
The current incarnation of IM is just a GUI extension of what everyone (including what was to become AOL) was doing back in the BBS days.
AOL's big "contribution" was bringing a lot of people who actually cared whether their messaging program was in a GUI or not to the Internet.
For this, I am forever in Steve Case's debt. I figure I owe him at least 10 beatings (one for every September since 1993).
What next? I bet Al Gore will try to patent The Internet!!!
I found one piece of prior art that predates the ICQ filing by five years: Broadcast 2.1, a shareware program for the Mac that let users instantly communicate with one or more other active Broadcast users in one or more zones of an AppleTalk network. Being a 2.1 release, I'm sure there were earlier ones....
I'm sure someone will tell me why this can't work, but what about a system like this?
1. Company X wants to file a patent asserting that they own IP rights to Idea/Product Y.
2. At the time the patent application is filed, Company X is legally obligated to place $10 million US (or some other suitably large amount) in an escrow account. Without this escrow deposit, the patent is considered as not having been filed.
3. If the patent application is rejected or if it is granted but later successfully challenged (on prior art, obviousness, etc), that $10 million instantly goes away, as the escrow company gives it to the government.
This system would still allow corporations to have IP for things they truly invented, but would make it financially suicidal to file a patent unless they were CERTAIN they deserved it. It would put the responsibility for discovering prior art on the filing corporation. (Ideally, the PTO should have the responsibility, but the corporations have the money and incentive to be much more thorough.)
What do you think?
Also, how can we solve the obvious problem with this idea, that being: ordinary people couldn't file a patent on a new idea if they had to put up $10 million, so where can we draw some lines between the megacorps and bright individuals?
...if they ever try any real inforcement of it....
Humm Quickly...
Unix Talk and IRC jump out at me.
Bad patent Office, no cookie.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Isn't this what the telephone company does? It monitors who's using their network, sends people who want in a dial tone, then connects the two parties.
And haven't they been doing this for decades?
Doh! The Baby Bells vs. AOL. Coming to a court near you!
$ who
$ talk someuser
Would that be covered too? Is my Linux box suddenly no longer free? Will I need to pay royalties to AOL?
I ask you, is AOL trying to protect and profit from AOL Instant Messenger, or are they trying to siphon license and royalty fees out of the developers of all the other IM systems?
I just cannot believe how woefully unsalvageable our Patent and Trademark Office has become. I believe that patenting software techniques should be forbidden internationally. I'll stand up for copyrighted source code, but not patents. Computer systems are designed to be multi-purpose, and so they uniquely lend themselves to overly-broad patent creation when people attempt to patent a technique they implemented within a computer.
Somewhere there has to exist a more articulate commentary on what I'm trying to say. I think it's appropriate to patent the specific computer system itself, but not the software techniques used to do work with it.
Patents were designed to protect innovators and allow them to profit from their development work, not as a means of making money by trying to subvert the work of others.
USNG: 14TPU4605
I remember back in 1990 or so having a script in my .cshrc file that would automatically "finger" all my friends to see if they were logged on, parse the finger output and spit out a simple list of who was on. I could then use "talk" to chat with them. There was no GUI, but it's the same functionality. And of course, it worked over the internet. Not that it was revolutionary or anything to take csh, finger and talk and combine them in this way...
This claim by AOL is totally bogus because we all know that IRC and other messaging programs were around way before ICQ! Help do your part in trying to stop AOL's patent on instant messaging by visiting http://stopaol.web1000.com/
%PHONE-I-RINGING, DECnet is ringing user Case on VMS node AOL.
%PHONE-I-ANSWER, User Case has answered
[VT100 screen becomes two separate scroll areas where keystrokes echo in real-time.]
[User presses ESC enters $ add APPLE::SCULLEY]
%PHONE-I-RINGING, DECNet is ringing user Sculley on node APPLE
%PHONE-I-REJECTED, User APPLE::Sculley has REJECTED your call [screen refreshes]
%PHONE-I-HANGUP, User Case on node AOL has hungup
%SYSTEM-I-SHUTDOWN, System going down forever
Since 1995.
Mirabilis wasn't first.
What ever happened to prior art?
--
python -c "import string,re;print string.join(map(lambda x:chr(string.atoi(x,36)),re.findall('..','2z2t2x36
nudge nudge knowwhatImean?
ok...bad joke...but I got karma to burn...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I just want to strangle, mangle, and kill people that apply for, grant, hold and license software patents. ARRGGHHHHHH!!!!! DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE KILL KILL KILL KILL
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Look at the patent and see what it talks about beofre you jump into stupid remraks
Here's a page with more information as well as an actual screen shot of the 12/19/73 announcement:
http://www.platopeople.com/termtalk.html
...is ewtoo and Playground (pgplus.ewtoo.org). These are telnet-based chat systems that allow people to inquire, and be informed automatically by creating lists, of the connection status of other users, and to exchange messages with them.
ewtoo (and cheeseplant's house) were running from '92, and the source of Playground+ is available at http://pgplus.ewtoo.org - PG was released in 96 as a quite late derivitive.
There are hundreds of these talkers and many are far order than ICQ, and still run today - eg: telnet://valdemar.org:2345
So yes, there is prior art that exactly matches this patent to the smallest detail.
The DECnet phone object (on most DEC operating systems) dated from at least the 1980s. It allowed one to contact one or more other folks on the net if they were there and communicate with them in real time. It worked (works, really; some still use it) on a VT100 type terminal, dividing the screen into as many pieces as you had participants, and each segment scrolled separately. Didn't use tcp/ip, but it certainly used a network and was instant messaging. And it sure as heck was way before ICQ was ever proposed. There have of course been other prior instant messaging systems, but this one was published widely and can still be found on most VMS systems. It is multi-user, and you could issue a command to see who was available (phone dir) if you wanted, or have the system automatically try to locate the person or people you wanted to talk to. I don't see how a broadly worded patent could avoid being vitiated by such prior art...at least for the broad claims. Possibly a few narrower ones might survive, to fall to other prior art. 1997 was not that long ago, and numerous BBS based systems also have implemented many other recently-patented technologies well beforehand. (For patents on sending multimedia content around, consider the Amiga systems that were exchanging multimedia on BBS and later on other networks, realtime for those who were connected, back in the mid 80s, before PCs could even THINK multimedia.
MIT has had a instant messaging system for years before ICQ came out.
e s/zeph-icq.html
It has been in use in other major universities including Caltech and
Stanford.
This system is called Zephyr.
http://web.mit.edu/answers/zephyr/
http://web.mit.edu/olh//Zephyr/
There is a web page that describes the similarities and differences
between ICQ and Zephyr (and notes that Zephyr came first)
http://web.media.mit.edu/~kkarahal/generals/VSpac
The differences are subtle and probably inconsequential;
I believe the similarities nullify the value of the patent.
Check out this 'Reciever'!
Seriously, come fucking on. Where are the Mods on crack?
In 1986-1989 timeframe, at the University of Central Florida, a student/employee there wrote an application called "friends". It would compare a list of your friends' Novell logins to logged-in users and list them. You could send a message to anyone on your friends list, which would appear on their screen. They could respond to you in kind. I believe there was some kind of two-way chat capability available, as well. I'm pretty sure this is not the only program of this type from the Novell networking days.
I believe the "friends" program is prior art that relates directly to the claims in AOL's patent. If someone with more knowledge of old Novell apps could find more concrete evidence, perhaps MSN, Yahoo, and others could use that evidence to mount a challenge to AOL's patent.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
AOL definitely predates 1993. I knew AOL users in 1988. Try again.
As I recall, IRC was available as early as 1987-1988. It was definitely around in early 1990, so it certainly predates the patent.
Also, there are older CMC systems (Computer Mediated Communication systems) invented by members of the student ACM chapter at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). (Not all of these CMC systems were Internet-based.)
In particular, CONNECT was a network server (but not Internet-based) which allowed users to connect to the server over the network and login, see what other people are signed on, and send public and/or private messages to other online users. CONNECT dates back to the spring of 1986, and replaced ACM:CB, a program which students previously used to chat -- but that program only worked between users logged into the MTS mainframe system; CONNECT was a true network server. (It, in turn, took the place of "vamp-mode" on *FORUM -- that is, people used to use the MTS forum software for interactive conversations, although it wasn't designed for that purpose. ACM:CB was, and CONNECT even moreso.)
After CONNECT was shutdown in 1991 for political reasons, another program called Clover took its place. Clover was an Internet-based server running on a Unix machine, licensed under the GPL. It had a client-server architecture and used a UDP-based protocol. Clover ran for several years until about 1994, when it was replaced by lily, a MOO-based server using a TCP-based protocol and new client software. Lily remains active today and is the current home of the online community which formed on the MTS mainframe in the mid-1980s.
I myself wrote a Unix-based server imitating CONNECT. This server was started in 1992, running on a server open to public access (via guest access) since early 1993, and eventually released last year. This server uses the standard TELNET protocol to avoid the need for a custom client.
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
A network......a bunch of computers connected by tcp/ip?
Multiple users, all of the students at my university (University of Victoria).
See how others were logged in...."finger"? automated with cron?
communicate with them...."talk" command?
seems like standard UNIX commands networked together....for example, the machines at a university, seem to be prior art for this patent?
Am i wrong?
Software Patent are still not legal in Europe (however more than 10000 have been granted but not defended in court yet). If you don't want this to happend to you, you have to act NOW. ...
Go for eurolinux.org, contact your MEPs (Member of European Parlement), talk to politics about the arm that software patent will do to innovation, to Small and Medium Company,
The two main criteria for any patent are that it has to be:
1. Non-obvious
2. Novel
This is neither.
How can anyone honestly say that this is a novel or non-obvious improvement beyond the examples of similar systems that everyone is citing?
The USPTO is out of control. No politician will change it and deal with the mess on their watch. Almost every patent examiner just wants to put in their 3 or 4 years and move on to a lucrative job in private IP practice.
This won't change until either mainstream public outrage becomes greater (don't hold your breath) or we all stop crying about this and find/form groups or companies who have the money to fight these or make a political stink.
I've generally considered BuddyList to be unpatentable, although it was the first presence system to be massively scalable, to completely avoid any kind of polling, AND to gain critical mass. It certainly might have been NARROWLY patentable originally more than many of these silly vanity patents.
AOL, before they purchased ICQ, had already developed BuddyList. I know because I wrote it in 1995 while a consultant to AOL. (No, I never received a single stock option. I also created a high performance database library used in BuddyList/Member Directory and created a project called Instant Images that was very cool, IMHO.)
Since the people that filed the ICQ patent were a couple years too late, it can't be a valid filing even though AOL owns it now. Additionally, I added a number of features and wrote all of the code so any AOL patent based on BuddyList would probably have to have my name on it to be valid.
sdw
Stephen D. Williams
How about irc? I think all of todays IM products got their start as IRC clients. I know Microsoft's did.