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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."
Wow of all the things. Static content ona dynamic page. Soon peole will be asking for patents on text because they had the idea of symbols and letters representing words.
What we really need now is patent reform. Companies should not be allowed to sit on IP while it gains broad adoption and then come back and extort companies in order to generate profits. We've seen too many companies do this, it's unethical, they know it, when are we going to stop them from continuing the practice.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Go check Apple's patents (maybe Xerox's) for hypertext linking. I think Apple covered this for Hypertext to Quicktime links.
Is this a FP? My first.
dot-sig.
I guess you have to sue Slashdot too, cause of the preferences page too, right?
> 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.
No, what's needed now is IP law that promotes innovation rather than blood-sucking.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
i think this was already discussed
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
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.
I'm patenting 1 and 0's
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
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
Three letters: P H P
Conceived in 1994, first public version in 1995.
Why not just patent images on a screnn conveying information.
that way you don't need to specify "buttons" of "frames".
I think that web pages should be treated as just a novel way to replace a library, and tell these wanna be patent millionaires to take a hike to the nearest cliff.
Information is information - doesn't matter if it's in a book, newspaper, or a bunch of pixles on a screen.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Hypercard came out in 1987.
'sfunny but my story on this was rejected over a week ago. Anyhow SBC actually have 2 patents on this type of technology: 5,933,841 6,442,574 both are entitled Structured Document Browser.
--
This sig is inoffensive.
DataBinding anyone ? afaik worked on ie3+ (1995) i believe, linked static content on the page with dynamic server data, enabling updates to be performed in realtime without refreshing the interface
Wired had an article last year about British Telephone's lawsuit against Prodigy for violating their patent on hyperlinks. So who really owns this patent?
One thing I don't understand about this (probably because IANAPL) is why the prior art search has to be limited to web applications. It seems as though the patent covers a pretty common user interface element. And slapping words like "over a computer network" on the end shouldn't be enough to differentiate (though, didn't some company get a patent for dutch auctions on the web?).
So what I'm saying is, isn't something like the "bold" button in Microsoft Word prior art for this. Or, if we want to get more related, can't we look for prior art in the CD-ROM applications that were common in the early nineties? They had user interfaces very similar to web sites.
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
It's been seven years. Patent's over. Right?
The idea that this is corporate greed rights all wrongs is really getting old. The catch all justification of our times. Where is this going to end?
What about linking to a search engine search results? Infoseek, Altavista or older search engines had the ability to bookmark query results, so there must be some use of that before.
If that can't be found in "normal" web, probably some results can be found in google groups.
SBC isn't a villian for trying to bully small companies with a horde of lawyers, any more than a dog is a villian for humping your leg. It's the expected nature of the beast.
Nevertheless, when the dog starts humping people's legs, we cut his balls off. SBC will need similar treatment to stop their anti-social behaviour.
Karma: Bad (mostly affected by being such an asshole)
The fact that, due to a stupid ruling during the Raygun administration, software patents are now able to exist (they were previously and properly not permitted) does not absolve companies abusing this fact to steal money of being immoral ("villians"). As the US legel system is based on the "whoever has the richest lawyer(s) wins", you'll be waiting until Hell freezes over for "IP law that promotes innovation" -- IP law is not compatible with innovation, it's only compatible with blood-sucking. These IP law slime need a good ass kicking, not coddling by columnists.
Gopher was exactly that.
Links to dynamicly changing pages. So it existed before the web.
I am also pretty sure that I made an assignment with hyperlinks around 1988 at university. Think it was a help system.
manx / xman is actually prior work. Represents a list of links in one windows, and when you press it, it will compile the corresponding man page and display it in the same or another frame.
This is way older than 1988.
Haven't others claimed this before? IIRC, a British telco tried this a year or so ago.
How on earth do they propose to collect on this? Shut down millions and millions of web sites? I'm getting this imagine of a corporate exec or lawyer rampaging around his office "You wanna mess with me?! I can shut down the INTERNET! Bwahahahahah!!"
Is this the latest in dodgy business models after the dot com crash - profit margin by lawyer?
I know this because Tyler knows this.
Both Yahoo! and Amazon (at the very least) were doing this in 1995, well before May 1996. Proving prior art on this patent is trivial.
Anyway, Great Outdoor Recreation Pages is a fairly old site, and while wayback only goes back to November 1996, I think it may be older.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
The best part of the article has to be that they approached museumtour.com (a site based in Oregon that sells educational toys over the Net) first. I WONDER WHY.
This is obvious. You knock over a small site to set a precedent, and then you go after someone with some real money. Build up your cash to knock over some real players out there.
This is its best moment in the article:
To its credit, SBC Intellectual Property was very polite in its approach to Museumtour, pointing out the existence of the patent, citing specifically how it believed Museumtour is in violation and offering to sell the company a license based on some percentage of gross sales.
I specifically love how they say they initially came in and asked nicely for a gross percentage of sales... it reminds me how the mafia is so polite, explaining how that you could avoid an "financial incident" by "licensing out protection" from said "financial incident" say, from, somebody you just met. Capiche?
If they really want to do this right, they need a fat man in a fedora and wingtips saying this to them in a raspy voice:
"Ya know, not saying that it is going to happen, but if it did happen it might cause you to lose some money there, pal. You better just license with us on your gross earnings, cuz, well, you never know. We live in strange times."
Yes, the article is right. They are very polite.
Until they attack you.
Microsft Patents Ones, Zeros
In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.
Software Wars
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.
I worked for a company called America.Net (an ISP in Atlanta) during this time providing tech support for ours and other companiews, including UU.net customers. UUnet had a web page with a link to "network status" that was dynamicaaly generated.
As for "structured doc browser", when did Acrobat appear? Basically it looks like the patent is more for a table of contents with icons that jumps to specified text... what you get with Acrobat table of contents.
meh
I remember designing BBS menubar interfaces using 'The Draw' way back in 1995 .. The menubar would be static but the content on the page (in this case user comments or lists of images and files) would change.
...than a patent on the human genome, which has been done more than once. (Note, for instance the patent on the genetic material of a member of the Hagahai tribe of Papua New Guinea - patent number 5,397,696.)
Like the article states, any kind of patent can be invalidated by the demonstration of prior art. This particular patent seems a bit too general to be nontrivial when it was filed in 1996.
The actual fees (starting at $570 annually for a company with a revenue of $100,000) aren't really all that large, though. My website would probably only have to pay $14 a year! But I do understand how this whole patent nonsense is spiraling out of control.
We can either work hard to prove prior art, or we can work hard to get the IP system restructured. Or we can just shell out the money and be done with it...
for great justice, this sig has been moved
I'm going to patent the use of an absorbant cellulose polymer material for cleaning the defecatory organs. Then you'll all be shitting yourselves...
IANAL. If you use XHTML, does this patent cover you?
--
Annotateit at Annotateit.com
one word "Ebay" Founded in September 1995. Try running an internet auction without static and dynamic elements.
Get a free ipod.
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.
But SBC is the villan. Who cares if they have a patent or not?!
If the some Nazi benefitted off from the murder of a few million Jews -- can he be faulted? After all, that Nazi had the law on his side! (/. tip: Always bring up Nazis to prove your point -- it works wonders.)
Morality is based on the Golden Rule. SBC's actions fail this. They used an overworked, clueless patent office to get a patent on a common, obvious process. And now they're attempting to profit from it by picking on a little guy. They not be villans under the laws of capitalism, but that doesn't mean they're not villans.
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.
It will be interisting to see who they sue next. Their going after this small .com because they know they cant fight, they know theyll roll right over them... set a precident, and then go after big dogs.
Our only hope is that the big dogs back the little guy.
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
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."
http://www.uspto.gov/ appears to violate this patent itself !
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.
What? Not hard to blame them for patenting some twiddling thing and then charging other people for those people's creations? They're fucking assholes. What's sad and absurd is that it never occurs to anyone just how sleazy, reprehensible and disgusting practices like this are.
We don't need prior art. We need firebombs.
Pissing contest over? :-)
OK, it is not related to a web page but this kind of ergonomy was already in either Atari/TOS and Apple MacOS...
(if the page is seen as the screen and the omnipresent-though-changing elements are seen as the menu bar)
I guess there is some sort of plagia, here.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
You couldn't patent patents themselves. But, you CAN patent a business model. Why not patent "a method for using patent law to extort money from legitimate businesses"? The only drawback is that (sadly) it would be trivial to come up with prior art. Still, it would make for a nice piece of political theater to illustrate the ridiculousness of the patent system. And who knows? If the system is screwed up *enough* you could win and either stop people from using your patent or get rich by forcing them to license you patent.
The idea here is that they will establish lots of history here with winning case after case. Once they have a "winning track record" here by winning the last 20 or so cases, then they will start to go after the bigger fish.
The courts don't care how big the defendants were (or are) in the wins, just that they won.
Any court will consider the fact that the patent has been successful 20 or so times in previous courts as pretty overwhelming evidence of it's validity.
Let's not forget the battlecry of the armchair observers - IANAL
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
There should be some way to make the corporate patent pool a negative asset. Pity you can't just browse through all the patents a company owns and file preemptive lawsuits against them requesting that the court bar them from ever attempting to enforce their frivolous patents. Or file restraint of trade suits against the patent office itself. Bleh.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In the US, you have one year to file for a patent, so prior art needs to beat the filing date by a year. This is not true for patents in the rest of the world, which have an "absolute novelty" requirement.
:)
If the only prior art that can be found is from early '96, we will have to relocate all our websites to Europe, which will really show how US IP laws protect American business
Does anyone besides me not equate legal with ethical, moral, righteous, virtous, etc.?
By Cringley's logic, if I do something vile that happens not to be illegal, I am not a villian. This is absurd.
</rant>
I believe I know of prior art for this. I used to work for a company called Security First Network Bank (The worlds first online bank) that went live October 1995. They had navigation bars in the bank summary, etc. The navigation bars were static but your account information was dynamic. It was www.sfnb.com (The link doesn't work anymore) but they got bought out by the Royal Bank of Canada who still uses the software. The company that wrote the webpages and banking software was Security First Technologies (www.s1.com). They may have patents related to the online software that would help.
Not that they're bad guys. They're just prosecuting a questionable patent claim against tiny players. I'm still reading the claim, but my first reaction -- and please remember that IANAPL (thank God) -- is that the patent applies to SGML or structured language browsers that have buttons mapped to specific parts of structured documents. In the claim summary:
(Emphasis added)So, it seems that webpages, which are themselves documents that contain "links [that] may take the user to other documents or to locations within the same document," seem to be specifically disclaimed by the patent authors.
Furthermore, from a functional perspective, the purpose of the invention is to allow people to "browse[e] documents according to their structure instead of their contents," whereas a frameset navigation layout either uses links to documents or anchor tags within documents.
This seems to be a case where the problem addressed by the patent solved itself, and now the patent owners want to squeeze money from a better, but irrelevant, mousetrap (to hack a metaphor to death). Perhaps one of the lurking patent lawyers would care to discuss this further?
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
On British TV's there's a ceefax system called teletext. In the 80's a further extension called fastext became available. Fastext was 4 (some static, some changing) links to other pages colour coded to 4 keys on the TV remote control.
m l
See http://www.mcmordie.co.uk/computing/develhist.sht
for more information.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
Up until this point I had been spending a large amount of my time writing dynamic html code that usually had links in it for various employers.
Now that this is patent infringment, my employers are far less likely to want to deal with it and instead we will just put up static text - which is way easier.
I hope I still get paid the same... or hell, a raise.
also, I'd like a nap.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
"... is not a villian for doing this ..."
Nothing wrong with patents but you should have the common sense to know when and how to use them. This is an obvious abuse of the system. It is the responsibilty of the patent owner and the patent office to get this right. You don't get off the hook by just blaming the patent office.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
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.
Before you start looking for prior art you need to know when the patent was applied for.
Like the infamous one click shopping of Amazon, the reason they could enforce it was they applied for the patent before everyone started doing it. If the application date is before the prior art, the art isn't prior.
I don't know the particulars, but keep that in mind when searching for prior art. And did they purchase the patent from someone else?
This is truly an unacceptable situation. Many posts I've seen call for IP reform, and I think that it needs to be specific, as in:
1) If you do not enforce a patent against a certain infringement within two years, you lose the right to enforce it. If you don't LEARN about it until that point, well, tough.
2) Current User-Interface patents and similar software patents are released into the public domain two years after application, and new ones will be denied patent protection. Between junk like Amazon's 1-Click and this mess, we need to stop this type of patent.
3) In liu of this, a new type of UI/Software algorithm protection needs to be established with reasonably high entry guidelines - industry/community review, intense prior art search, reasonable announcement, significant achievement, etc. These would not have a preset term - this would be decided on with the application, with NO recommendation by the person applying. This would prevent 'hyperlink' patents but would secure important developments, like the predictive text input system on slashdot a month or two ago and other INNOVATIONS.
It's nice to call for patent reform, but you need to say what you want. The numbers and specifics are arbitrary, but you get the idea.
Tell your congresscritter that you want patent reform and then they'll probably *lengthen* the terms.
get sued by sbc and slashdoted in the same week.
Well, I think it's time Sun and AOL weighed in to defend THEIR patents against this unwarranted assault on them by SBC.
... yes, for their patents on Java. One of the original purposes of Java was to permit websites to include dynamic content, INCLUDING NavBars (in fact, I believe the first JDK (1.0.3, IIRC) I ever downloaded included a navbar in the example code), and to not have to worry about what platform their dynamic content would have to execute on.
... yes, I'm SURE there is probably an old dusty Netscape patent relating to javascript and it's use for things such as site navigation aids, creation of dynamic content linked to a static element, and all those other client-side tasks that we've all come to love like acting as spyware, creating & reading cookies, pop-up windows that resize to take over the screen (oops ... my bad) ... heh!
Sun??
AOL??
Anyhow, couple those with Apple's HyperCard patents and there's PLENTY of prior art out there. Maybe, just maybe, if we could get Sun & AOL fighting with SBC over who owns what, the sharks might eat each OTHER instead of the small fry.
utter rubbish
http://web.archive.org/web/19961030020512/www.berk eley.edu/about/
No sig, sorry.
The "bold" button does not refer to "sections" of the document.
However, claim 13 of '574 starts with "a browser for navigating a document". A website is not a browser. It is a document. In fact, the title of both patent '841 and patent '574 is "structure document browser", not "structured document" or "structured document browsing".
Acrobat Reader's outline view (where it continues to be displayed on the side) to be might infringe. Powerpoint might infringe (browsing the presentation with a list of the slides on the side). Web browsers might infringe because it will render documents with this functionality. However, I do not see how one can objectively construe a website (a set of (possibly dynamic) text files with loose definitions of layout and navigation) to be a "browser", unles the website navigation is writtin in Java (thereby perhaps making it a "browser").
The language of the patents cover document browsers. Web pages are documents, you know that things that are browsed by document browsers.
Even though it's a bull shit patent I could see trying to say it covered Explorer/Mozilla/Opera.. etc, but web pages? Come on.
IANAL but if a web page can constitute a legally binding agreement isn't that legal proof that it's simply a document?
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
The truly unfortunate thing here is the future of www.museumtour.com. A huge company like SBC comes along and starts throwing its legal weight around and this poor company will be crushed. Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent defending the entire internet will be a huge burden and possibly destroy the company. On the other hand, If they give in and pay the license, they set terrible precedent.
The BS WILL eventually blow over. People WILL still be able to use their links. But, the unknown is whether www.museumtour.com, the random-target website, will survive.
(sig on loan to Smithsonian)
HOW ELSE COULD IT BE DONE?!?
What other way could you link to dynamic content? You could use a "dynamic link", but if it was a dynamically generated link then it would itself qualify as dynamic content! So how did you link to that? Must've been (eventually) from a static link, whether on a page or in your browser preferences.
All dynamic content is traceable to some static link. It's not a new idea, it's a necessary condition!
This is not a "valid patent". Every dynamic page which existed prior to this patent was prior art.
That's an excellent point. I've only glazed over the patent, and certainly I may be missing something totally obvious, but I think this answers your question:
Trouble is, I can't find anything in the Abstract or Claims that would indicate that their claim is limited to hypertext documents on the web. Surely interfaces other than web applications fit the vague definition they've given? OK, so a constant user interface for displaying and viewing that displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes? Glancing around my desktop, here are some other interfaces that seem to fit this description:
Then there's this gem:
The keyboard. The keyboard!! I guess all the mainframers out there aren't safe from IP liability either. Who do these clowns think they are?
Yes, we need cute cartoon firebomb graphics. They look great on anarcho-syndicalist agitprop, and are amusing to young people.
Karma: Bad (mostly affected by being such an asshole)
...is to stop supporting these companies.
Do you have Southwestern Bell Phone service? Switch to a local provider.
Do you have a Cingular phone? Switch to a different provider.
Do you have SBC DSL? Switch to RoadRunner.
It's easy. And when they ask why you're disconnecting, tell them that you don't like this lawsuit.
DIAMOND v. DIEHR, 450 U.S. 175 (1981)
Argued October 14, 1980.
Decided March 3, 1981.
Judges and who nominated them.
For
Renquist -- Nixon
Burger -- Nixon
White -- Kennedy
Stewart -- Eisenhower
Powell -- Nixon
Against
Stevens -- Ford
Blackmun -- Nixon
Marshall -- Johnson
Brennen -- Eisenhower
Nice jab at the Reagan administration, but wrong as alway lib. He was in office a whole 2 months when the opinion was given. Why didn't that lib White dissent? Why didn't all the repulican nominated justices agree? This is hardly political.
That is, noone can stop me from producing a medical drug myself, for my own use, even if it's patented.
Thus, someone trying to sell a Content management system using static links to dynamic pages would be infringing. But just putting your own pages online is allowed. Or am I just uninformed?
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!).
This is the best comment I've seen so far, but it doesn't really prove prior art. The page you refer to is dated 1999. As with many innovations, the presence of an enabling mechanism does not necessarily indicate prior art.
Can you prove that frames were intended for use as contemplated by the patent, i.e. a consistent user interface across a document or site? Not from that article. Remember too that not only frames are at issue here -- a navigation bar using tables or divisions would appear to be covered by the patent as well.
While it is blatently obvious with hindsight that frames can be used in this manner, some Googling around will show that a huge amount of web design material at the time references a document called "Ameritech Web Page User Interface Standards and Design Guidelines" by Detweiler, M.C. and Omanson, R.C. (1996), on the matter of creating a consistent user interface by using frames. If that doesn't ring a bell, Ameritech was the original holder of the patent, and recently acquired by SBC.
Reading the patent provides some more insight too: they contemplate a document with embedded codes indicating document sections, that conforms to a predefined structure. Read this way, the patent does not partain to HMTL frames, because HTML is a hypertext linked collection of documents, not a single document. A navbar or frame moving the view to named references within a single document, however, would clearly violate the patent.
So is the patent valid? Well, that involves proving prior art; not just that frames existed, but that they were used for the purpose of navigation, both in a single document and between documents. Any evidence of tables to do the same thing would also be useful. Also crutial is having an incontestible source -- printed information is best, a reputable online news source or journal is the next best thing.
w3.org records Edelstein's Sep 1995 proposal to include frames in the HTML specification, but the example page he sites is no longer available.
The Netscape Navigator 2.0 announcement contains "Frames, a new page presentation capability that enables the display of multiple, independently scrollable panels on a single screen, each with its own distinct Internet address. They also enable a region of the screen to be frozen in place as the user scrolls through information on a page". Tantalising, but it doesn't mention using the frozen region for navigation.
Most promising are the Mozilla 2.0 release notes. Two of the example links are broken, while third doesn't work in my browser, although the pages appear to be there. It clearly demonstrates the use of a navigation frame to select different pages in a site, and view them in a "dynamic" frame. That said, the navigation frame itself is not entirely static (it scrolls, but does not change), and there is no navigation inside a single document from the frame.
There is a lot of effort required to find proper evidence of prior art that will hold up in court. The Wayback Machine would provide great evidence, if only we can find it.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
In 1995, the first website I ever did (www.worldford.com, for a Ford dealership in Fort Lauderdale, FL) used frames for a consistent left-hand navigation system. Of course, the website no longer exists in that form, but I have plenty of witnesses, as well as my backup files, the original contract for the job, etc...
I thought it was pretty cool, too. We used 3D buttons to look like a car stereo, with a green LED-style readout at the top telling you which section you were in. Anyone remember this one?
(No, it doesn't show up in the Wayback Machine, which only goes to 1996 anyway)
dude, you have to seriously improve your faster-than-light posting before your post becomes prior art.
Free as in mason.
Perhaps I'm being naive but the "locked" screen areas of 3270 displays (and non-scrolling areas of vt100 as well) seem like the perfect prior art. From the 70s.
They learned to file suits on stuff where there most likely is prior art.
The first articles I saw claimed it was frames they'd patented. Netscape 2 had frame support in '95.
They learned to file the first suit against someone without deep pockets
BT filed suit against Prodigy. Prodigy was owned by SBC, who probably had deeper pockets than BT. SBC is filing against Museumtour. Who ever heard of them before this suit?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Apple's ancient hypercard system used a tabbed interface to access dynamic pages. This would seem to be a clear example of widely published prior ART. Hypercard could also be a web interface too, though it was more (and less) than that.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yahoo will not be attempting to void SBC's claim any time soon:
http://sbc.yahoo.com/
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."
OIC. So if something is "legal" then you're not a villain for doing it. So like if it's legal to shove Jews into gas chambers then it's ok to do it and if somebody hauls you in for a trial years later, you can just bleat out. "But I was just doing my job..." and that makes everything ok. Bullshit.
BTW, if you're wondering...I use this example for all cases when people justify their actions by saying "well it's leeeegaaallll so it's ok", not just for patents.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
There's a federal law prohibiting telephone solicitors from calling cellular phones to sell products or services. Check out US Code, Title 47, Chapter 5, Section 227(b)(1):
Also note paragraph 3:
Looks like SBC Ameritech owes you at least $500...of course it'd probably cost you $10,000 in attorney fees before you saw a dime (unless you feel like buying a few reams of legal-size paper for the paperwork you'll need to file with your oh-so-friendly local civil servant), not to mention the lost wages from having to take days off from work to show up in court, etc. etc.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
If SBC is going to argue that a site is infringing on their patent, they have to argue that a site is the PRODUCER, not the CONSUMER, of the patented device.
So if there are thousands of different people on the internet who came up with the same invention, would that not make the patent invalid as it would be a natural conclusion of any competent person?
Conversely, if they argue that it's a device produced by only a small number of entities, but USED by many, wouldn't the sites not be liable since they are only comsumers? It would be like Company X suing *ME* because I bought a product from Company Y that's infringing on X's patent.
IANAL, of course.
paintball
I was discussing this particular patent with friends a couple of weeks ago (when the story debuted in The Register).
Would it be possible for some trusted organization (EFF?) to set up a Journal of Prior Art, where you could submit ideas you wanted to give to public domain? Once a month, all the submissions would be bundled and published, with one copy sent to the Library of Congress to establish timeline. Whenever some new technology like frames came out, you could iterate over ideas and submit them. That way, when bonehead patents like these come up, you'd have at least one resource to search through to try to invalidate them. From a legal point of view, you should be safe...worse comes to worse, you get some already patented ideas in the Journal, but that's not illegal, and doesn't really decrease the usefulness of what would be there. About the only legal risk I can see if is someone managed to violate the DMCA with a tech description (decryption or the like).
The questions would be:
A) is this feasible from a resources point of view.
B) Does prior art have to be a full implementation, or can it be a description of an implementation?
And most importantly,
C) Could someone take any of the suggestions, vary one tiny detail (that one's red, this is blue), then patent that? You don't want to create a cookbook for scumsuckers!
Check out Netscape 2.02's Navigator Handbook, which was created in 1995! (look at the bottom of the page)
AOL was doing this shit back in the 1980's FOR GOD'S SAKE! Everything they had was dynamic content accessed via static buttons, including documents.
How about every single HyperCard stack ever made? A stack is a document. Did these idiots ever try clicking on any of the buttons in a stack?
FROM WHERE THE FUCK DO WE GET THESE GODDAMNED RETARDS?!?!?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
In January 1996, I set up a site to keep track of social events happening in Sydney Australia. The site consisted of a dynamic database of events, accessed by a perl CGI script. The front page to the site contained a number of static links pointing to dynamic pages, generated by the CGI script.
The static parts of the site are in the Internet Archive.
The dynamic content is missing from the archive (I still have the perl script and database on my local hard disk), but it is obvious from the form of the hypertext references that they point to dynamic pages, as they contain prefix expressions.
The Internet archive entry is dated January 17th 1999. The site was in existence well before this date. The archived page contains a message from me, dated 23rd May 1997, the date the site ceased operation. On 13th January 1997, I sent a message to aus.culture.ultimo in which I stated that the site had been running for twelve months. This message is archived at google:
So there it is. A dynamic/static web site whose history can be verified back to January 1996 by independent sources.
It seems like the patent is really covering only the "browser". A website only produces tags between funny little characters, and the human at the other side uses a browser which formats it nicely, presumably violating the patent. It seems like SBC has a nice case against Netscape and Microsoft, not content providers.
So I'll step forward, Bob. I implemented the layout for the individual document format for the CELT project (formerly CURIA) web site in 1995. We generated (and still do) some 500 documents from SGML masters in Old Irish, Latin, and Old French using TEI into HTML via an Omnimark script. Click on the link labeled "HTML" next to any document listed in http://celt.ucc.ie/publishd.html to see it.
(It's simplistic to the point of being crude, but we specifically wanted to keep the Table of Contents on view all the time, but let the user change the document panel display when needed, which is pretty much the point of the patent, if I've understood you. Despite my dislike of the navigational problems of frames, that was how we did it.)
Any of the hundreds of scholars who have visited the site since then will be able to attest this, and I presented papers about what we were planning to do as long before as 1992 and 1993. The site has been extensively publicized in the academic field (it was originally the 9th Web server in the world) although we never specifically shouted about the technique of what we did, as it seemed too simple and obvious :-)
But it's easy to go back further. I think this method was used in one of the original SGML offline browsers, perhaps the first: the IETM (ebook) system called DynaBook, at that time (late 1980s) from EBT (Providence, RI), later Inso Corp; it was still until recently being marketed by Enigma.