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SBC Patents Links, Dynamic Pages
Oculus Habent writes "Robert Cringley has an article on a patent that SBC aquired. Patented in 1996 is the concept of linking to dynamic content with a static element of a page. First approaching museumtour.com, a small site, and asking them to obtain a revenue-based license, SBC appears to be trying to set precedent. He goes on to note that SBC is not a villian for doing this - it is after all a valid patent, and that what is needed now is prior art."
Anyway, here is the letter itself and here is the obscene pricing scale for using navigation bars. I'm having a hard time thinking of a site that DOESN'T use a unified navigation interface...
End of lesson. You may press the button.
okay here is prior art..
Bluestone formely owned by HP coded a vendor website for NSA 1995 that used the same linking mechanisms!!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
http://www2.museumtour.com/sbc.html:
Harlie D. Frost
President
SBC Intellectual Property
6500 River Place Boulevard
Building III, 1st Floor
Austin, TX 78730
(512) 231-7000
However, looking at the letter sent to museumtour, it looks like they patented frames in which one frame has navigational information. So no one had frames before 1996?
As I read what SBC has in one of the patents, they claim the use of frame tags to make a static menubar frame that controls a dynamic target frame is covered...
Funny thing is, the frame and frameset tags were sort of designed for that...
I would liken this to patenting the notion of paragraphs when typewriters came out with carriage return keys.
It's more like seventeen years, not seven.
Errrm, static content linking to dynamic content? Has no-one ever heard of icons? I was writing RPGs back in the 80s where, for example, an inventory icon would link to (you guessed it) a character's inventory. The icon was a static part of the player's HUD and the inventory was dynamic in that it reflected the current state of items carried by the character. Games have used this "technology" for years. I think this qualifies as "prior art".
Prior art? I find it awefully strange that Navigator 2.0 was released in the fall of 1995, introducing frames to the HTML worl, and months later some corporation is trying to patent one of the primary purposes of this innovation. From the Netscape website:
If you read the legal letter they sent, it seems this is precisely what they think they're patent covers. I'm beginning to get to the point where I think we need to enact criminal penalties for this type of obvious scum-mongering.
The letter to museumstore specifically lists claim 13 of the later patent. Here is claim 13:
13. A browser for navigating a document comprising a plurality of sections, the browser comprising:
a display window displaying a document; and
a user interface comprising a plurality of selectors automatically configured to correspond to a respective plurality of sections of the document regardless of what section of the document is being displayed in the display window;
wherein the plurality of selectors are not part of the document displayed in the display window of the browser and continue to be displayed after one of the plurality of selectors is selected.
The thing is, the claim covers a browser. Museumstore doesn't make a browser. IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc. are browsers. I'd have to look more closely at the patent to see what they mean by "browser."
Check out this page for prior use -
Although the primary way this functionality is implemented today is through frames, the SBC application appears to pre-date frames appearing in Navigator. Remember, they had up to 1 year from the time of their work in order to apply for the patent in the first place. This pre-frames software, released in September of 1995 but well known far before that, shows all of the features claimed in the SBC patent, through use of LINK and GROUP tags. This should be all that's needed to invalidate the SBC patent, which was applied for in May of 1996.
Patent claims have to be carefully analyzed, often they don't mean what they seem to mean at first sight, and one has to be extremely petty-minded. ...
You have to break up the claim into single features. In this claim, features are:
1. a browser for navigating a document
1.1. comprising a plurality of sections
2. The browser comprising
2.1. a display window
And so on. To infringe this claim, your "device" has to have ALL the features, if it lacks a single feature, it is no infringing the patent.
On the other hand, something that is "prior art" needs to have all this features, too. The only exemption from this: If the additional feature is "obvious", whatever this means.
The circa-1994 version of IBM's BookManager Library Reader for Windows predated (and outclassed!) the circa-1996 SBC/Ameritech 'Structured Document Browser'. This 1994 User's Manual figure clearly shows the concepts of frames, icons, and menus all at work in one screen two years before the initial Ameritech patent filing. As others have mentioned, the Ameritech patent specifically notes that it covers "any computing environment", so you needn't restrict yourself to the web (Ameritech didn't!).
Geez... is it really that hard to find dynamically-updated pages back then, or am I missing something.
Having formerly been a undercapitalized ISP back then (1993-1996), I remember several customer projects that had links to dynamic content, including:
Omaha Steaks, who was an early merchandiser on the net
and
the Applied Information Management Institute, who had written their own code to front-end an Oracle database complete with company and job listing information. (I remember the Sparc servers rather well sitting in the equipment room and listening to their IT people talk about how the code and project worked). Click on CareerLink button and it would take you to a page of career areas, and click on the career area and it'd pull up dynamic pages of content all driven by the back-end database.
This was all pre-May 1996, since my involvement with the company began winding down over summer 1996.
*scoove*
From the article:
This column is about U.S. patent 5,933,841, which was granted to the old Ameritech phone company in 1999, and is now owned by Ameritech's acquirer,SBC Communications...patent exists and was applied for on May 17, 1996.
I forgot to add:
The other day on NPR they had a story about immigrant businesses in California being extorted by "consumer rights" groups citing "health violations". The threat was that if they didn't pay $1000 they would be taken to court over these "health violations". These legal threats would be mailed out en masse to 200-300 businesses. Being small businesses they could not afford the thousands of dollars it would take to defend such threats so the obvious choice is to give in. $1000 x 300 = $300,000 for little more than sending out a letter.
SBC's move is the same. They put the hook out in the water and see if they get a bite and if they do the letters start going out in bulk. Think about how many small businesses on the web us SBC's supposed IP? The main difference between this situation and the one in CA is that SBC is a large established company with a stable of lawyers. In CA the extortionists are unheard of consumer rights groups with no addresses and maybe one or two lawyers. The CA groups have found a lucrative enterprise - how much more so lucrative will it be for SBC?
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon