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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:
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.
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.
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.
Huh? How does this relate to AOL's patent? The patent is more then just sending a text message to another user.
-Brent...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.
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.
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
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.
-BrentAbstract:
This sig intentionally left justified.
How about this, then?
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.
There. It's the who/rusers part of who/rusers/talk that makes this patent sillier than most.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
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
I've got who and rusers installed on my linux client. Now where's the network that who/rusers provides? Oh wait, it doesn't technically provide a network. I think that AOL has this patent clean.
-Brent...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.
Perhaps this is what we need to get a reform in the patent system?
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
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!
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...
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
...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.
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.
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
So what you're saying is that companies that don't have $10M loose change to put in escrow can't file patents?
I think a better solution would be to require the applicant to file a research showing examples of similar prior inventions, and how the invention they're applying for is unique. If a prior art becomes available the owner of the prior art can then hold the applicant liable for damages, based on the applicant's investment/return rather than the prior art's return (so the penalty relates to the amount made through mischief)
imho