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NCR Patents the Internet
An anonymous reader writes "We all know about NCR's lawsuit against Palm & Handspring, but I haven't seen much press about patent infringements they are claiming against some of the biggest sites on the planet. According to documentation that a friend's company has recently received, their patents protect everything from keyword searching to product categorization. Patents to look for (and filed in 1998) include 6,253,203, 6,169,997, 6,151,601, 6,085,223 and 5,991,791 . IMHO, this is absolutely outrageous and is likely to cause billions in both legal fees and eventual licensing fees (eBay, Amazon and MSFT have already licensed from NCR). How is this not the lead story on every site? every day? Maybe because no one wants to get sued for having an online business."
Finally, someone will make money off the internet.
(eBay, Amazon and MSFT have already licensed from NCR)
Is there proof of this?
Patent 6085223 describes the method to look up the very same patent using the USPTO database by clicking on this url! The patent office is violating the patent!
At least, by making patents available on the internet like this they make them sort of "open source" so that stupid patents like this one will be challenged as soon as someone finds out.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
Another shining example of the US patent office's brilliance. What child has never done that on a swing before? The children at the US patent office, obviously...
I used to say "Don't worry... there's no way anyone will take this seriously."
Except that they are. Ebay, Amazon, etc are licensing these patents. Why? Because it's easier than fighting in court.
But I still used to say "Don't worry... eventually, this will get bad enough, and real reform will come."
Except the people with the money to change things are also benifiting from this situation. See Amazon's "one click" patent.
So now I say, "start worrying." I get the very bad impression that things will get much worse before they get better.
So, what needs to change?
1. The legal system makes it more affordable to lie down and take it than to stand up to those who more than likely have no legal leg to stand on. This has to change.
2. Patents protect just about everything possible. If you can do it with a computer, chances are someone, somewhere, has a copyright that you are infringing. I once saw a patent on nested for lops, for crying out loud. Software and business practices shouldn't be patentable.
3. Lobbyists have got to go. People buy legislation. That is not democracy, and it is not right.
4. Parties. "Go ahead, waste your vote on a third party candidate. Muahaha!" We should not have to choose between Republicrates, Democans, and Hopeless.
Thomas Galvin
The problem is that this is going to screw over a whole lot of people before laws are enacted to end this legalized extortion.
What makes this especially ugly is that it's going to have a disproportionate impact on smaller web-based retailers, because they are going to have neither a legal department nor the hundreds of thousands of dollars a legal battle of this scope would cost--the only real choice will be to either pay the extortion money or not do business on the web. Everyone but the patent holder loses.
everyone knows al gore did that
Can't Al Gore claim prior art?
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Agreed.
:(
"A method, apparatus, article of manufacture, and a memory structure for storing and retrieving data in a database implementing privacy control is disclosed." (Abstract of 6,253,203)
I think a filesystem with permissions would be prior art for this... Who the hell would sign off on this patent?
Further on...
"1. A data warehousing, management, and privacy control system, comprising... a database table comprising a plurality of data columns and at least one data control column... information reflecting consumer privacy parameters"
exactly passwd which contains a "customer's" password hash and his/her home directory and shell.
"5. The apparatus of claim 1, further comprising a customer interface module providing access to the database table via the privileged view and to permit specification of the consumer privacy parameters."
A file system with permissions.... (eg. AS400 whose fs is *actually* a database)
Can anyone else see anything that's origional about this patent? I'm looking through all the claims and they all fit with either a filesystem or a rdbms.
Why the hell would anyone take an infringement law suit seriously from these patents?
Sometime the profound stupidity of businesses really hits me. Like the time an old boss of mine wanted to patent the ability to write libraries so that the implementation could change without changing the code written against it (ie. API's). This was in 2002.
It's broken, but I don't see it getting fixed in this life time
-RB
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
How is this not the lead story on every site? every day? Maybe because no one wants to get sued for having an online business.
Or maybe, just maybe now, because it's a complete non-story. If these patent claims are so ludicrous then they will never stand up to a serious challange. You say the USPTO grants some silly patents? So what else is new? Call me back when any of these manages to survive a day in court.
Isn't this story early? I thought we did patent hysteria on Thursdays.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
This sort of a patent is good news overall, because it will give anti-patent advocates yet another argument against patents, and perhaps Congress will get a wakeup call from the people they fear the most--ordinary voters motivated to cause change. The people did win the vitamin battle against well connected and rich corporations. Who says we can't win the patent battle?
Unfortunately, this type of patents is also good news for large corporations. Sure they might have to pay a few dollars here and there, but it keeps that pesky innovation from the small players at bay, and that's the biggest threat to the established order--not patents from another stagnant mega corp. So it's dumb for a big company to fight this kind of patent. For them, patent payments are just musical chairs.
Don't you mean "Not making money on the internet was patented by Amazon"?
adjusts tin-foil hat
Personally I think there's a major backlash campaign being given unspoken support from all the old-money dow-like companies. The internet is something they have never understood, and view it only as a threat to thier way of doing business.
The legal system in no way supports the proliferation of free technocratic society, but serves only to perpetuate old-money institutions.
You will never find a retired programmer on the bench. You will find a trial lawyer of some 30 years experience whos outlook is based entirely on precedent(think 1970s and 1980s). This was a time of farms, banks, automobile production, petroleum embargoes, and cold war.
90% of the serving officials in the 3 branches of government were lawyers before being elected senators, or supreme court judges, or in many cases presidents. Very very rarely will you ever see an engineer or scientist turned politician.
We are a fundamentally misrepresented class of people. Our priorities are largely askew from the priorities of the "majority voting public". All we want is unlimited bandwidth, unlimited computing power, and to be left alone. These 3 things are very much within our technological/finacial means as a nation. If the $200billion spent on the defense budget was poured into building a broadband infrastructure we would have it. And we all know how quickly processors and storage mediums improve. Simply said there are no real technological bariers towards the implementation of what the majority of us here want.
But none of this will happen because old-money has become aware of the threat of giving abundant resources to "everyone". They will use the legal system as a means of slowing/crippling/dismantling the "internet" until it is no longer functional.
Said again, the "internet" is under siege from old money...and it is nothing if not a war. Throwing file-sharers in jail, patenting hyper-links, all of this is insanity...but in war you use whatever means necessary to destroy your enemy. We, and what we represent, are the enemy of old-money institutions....and they will leverage every resource in thier means to destroy us.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
NCR Corporation provides us with some examples to get you going:
- Exactly like a database, except it's on the Internet.
- Exactly like a secure database, except it's on the Internet.
- Exactly like a commerce database, except it's on the Internet.
- Exactly like a database client, except it's on the Internet.
- Exactly like computer security, except it's on the Internet.
Thanks, NCR!Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
How about Penn Jillette's (of Penn & Teller) patent for arousing women in a hot tub?
This sig intentionally left justified.
What everyone forgets is that if anyone in the US was doing what your patent describes before you filed for the patent, then your patent is no good. And it doesn't cost billions of dollars to get a patent invalidated. First you need to get sued for violating a patent. Then you need to show some proof that at least one person was doing whatever the patent says before the filing date. Then you win. Given that it costs a minimum of $20k to get a patent, all this company has done is waste lots of money. If it ever tries to bring suit it'll spend even more money and it'll have nothing to show for it because these patents all seem to cover stuff that people've been doing with computers for a while. I doubt you will ever see a suit on any of those patents. It's like the guy who patented swinging. He spent at least $20k to prove that he doesn't understand the patent system. All I need is to bring in some witnesses that'll say they were swinging before Nov. 17th 2000 and he has officially wasted a lot of money. Patent examiners can only work with what they find in literature and trade journals etc. Courts can use anything you bring them.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6368227'.WKU.&OS=PN/6368227&RS=P N/6368227
#6,253,203 - June 26, 2001
A database containing personal privacy prefferences.
I distictly remember setting AOL privacy prefferences in 1996...dont even try to tell me they didn't use a database to track that
#6,169,997 - January 2, 2001
Category viewing of portal content such as News, Sports, Weather, etc instead of simple chronological organization.
I signed up for my Yahoo! ID in fall 1997.....
#6,151,601 - November 21, 2000
This one uses the words "collecting" "transformation" "organization" and "transmitting" so many times I can't even understand it. However, it appears to be for using a database system to analyze network traffic at the ISP level.
I don't know the inner workings of AOL or any other major ISP, but I'm betting they've been using these type of systems for a loooong time.
#6,085,223 - July 4, 2000
This is for connecting a client to a database through a seperate step, seperating the client and the database.
One acronym to defeat this one: ODBC
#5,991,791 - November 23, 1999
A database system to catalog a bunch of stuff...whether digital or not, and to deliver it when requested..
My local public library had everything on an electronic catalog waaaaaay back in 1990. And vending machines delivered me content on request as well.
There's your prior art - run with it
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....