Slashdot Mirror
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
> 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
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.
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
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.)
Wired had an article [wired.com] last year about British Telephone's lawsuit against Prodigy for violating their patent on hyperlinks. So who really owns this patent?
No, they tried to patent the very concept of hyperlinking (they failed). This patent is an attempt to patent a particular kind of link. So the prior art needed is more specific. Others on the page seem to have some good examples, but a reference, for example, to "Hypercard" is not enough until you discuss the specific elements of the prior that match up to the earlier patent.
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...
one word "Ebay" Founded in September 1995. Try running an internet auction without static and dynamic elements.
Get a free ipod.
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."
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.
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
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."
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?
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").
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.
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