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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."
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.
...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.)
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.
http://www.uspto.gov/ appears to violate this patent itself !
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.
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.
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.
As you can see, this person did not pay his royalties and thus, his link displays as text.