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Interwoven Patents Code Versioning
webengr writes "It seems like the USPO is pretty lenient when it comes to awarding software patents. CVS has been around for a long time, but now Interwoven has been awarded a new patent covering version control of web assets. The claims include, 'The use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository for representing and hosting content and its structure,' and 'The combined concepts of file history, versioning, comparison, and merging as it relates to content, provide an archive of all individual changes as well as collections of changes so they can be versioned and audited.'"
We all know the awarding of patents has gotten out of control. This is just another example...
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Asleep at the wheel, recklessly driving us all over a cliff of patent infringement lawsuits? Yeah, that's fair.
When will the patent office get a clue? Doesn't *anyone* there make even the slightest attempt to search for prior art? A 5 minute google search should have invalidated this patent.
pertinent info frfom article
Interwoven's U.S. patent (#6505212)
A system for asset management comprised of multiple workareas, each configured to maintain a virtual copy of content as it would appear when published;
A staging area to which content is submitted from multiple work areas and where any conflicts between content can be resolved;
Branches and sub-branches (for different projects or initiatives) that contain individual workareas, staging areas, and editions which allows for massively parallel development on a single platform;
The use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository for representing and hosting content and its structure;
Virtualization of all content regardless of location as well as Web and application servers - this allows contributors to make changes "in context" of the entire site;
The combined concepts of file history, versioning, comparison, and merging as it relates to content, provide an archive of all individual changes as well as collections of changes so they can be versioned and audited.
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
I'm just wondering if the patent being granted is someone hinged on Interwoven's claim to be the first to do version control for 'web assets' (ie, HTML, images) as opposed to source code.
The fact that there's no technical difference between version control on an HTML file and version control on a 'C' file seems to be the sort of thing that's lost on the patent office.
Jeff Noon?
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Heh, I knew my slackerly habits would pay off eventually!
Send us your Linux Sysadmin articles
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Nobody at the US Patent office must version control their documents. Maybe thats how patents get awarded so easily?
OK, so the patent covers elements of CVS and webdav...does anyone know of good example of prior art including dating. Since the text of the patent is kinda broad, maybe that can be used against this patent and invalidate it's usage.
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
And in our next story, Microsoft is now widely perceived to be the playground bully of computer software.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Well at least this shouldn't harm the development of the next version of Windows...now M$crosoft has a legal reason to abandon OS patches and leave their software as buggy as the day it arrives on retail shelves.
... someone jumps in to tell us that patents have no authority until they are successfully defended against a challenge, blah blah blah...
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Bugger that you new fangled whippersnapper.
RCS now that is where the real programmers live.
CVS... PAH!
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Perhaps they (interwoven) are taking a lesson from what slashdot has been preaching and will sit on the patent and never file any suits, thus taking away the chance of another company doing just that?
Or maybe I just have too much faith in society.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
...this is OUT OF CONTROL. Write your congressperson. Vote accordingly.
damn, damn, damn.
i don't think Timothy's quite right. Not that this is a whole hell of a lot better, but the patent appears to apply only to the application of versioning/history, etc. to web content. That still sucks, but i don't believe it'll impact code versioning systems (e.g. CVS) though perhaps someone using CVS as a backend for their own CMS would be in trouble.
I'm not sure how broadly the courts would read "content" but on first glance, it seems all the coders out there should be ok.
Just a layman's opinion, but patents are ususally pretty specific in their scope, and this one mentions "Web" and "Content" not "code" or "source"
"It seems like the USPO is pretty lenient when it comes to awarding software patents." no kidding. the USPO appears, in some cases, to not only be lenient, but to be completely oblivious to the purpose of having patents, as well as having wild interpretations of patent law. software patents, the way that they are currently handled, is incorrect, with regards to the original means that was set out by even Thomas Jefferson himself. to be able to patent compiled binary code, without regards to the source, or ENTIRE details of the mechanism that the software is implying is insane, and will continue to destroy the legal ability to innovate based on derivative work.
Link to US PTO site for this patent:r ?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =35&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=Interwoven&OS=Inter woven&RS=Interwoven
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parse
I think the patents should be reformed in the following way:
1. Submit the patent idea to the patent office- as a "pending patent".
2. Patent office does a search (web or otherwise) on prior art, billing the individual/corporation that submits the patent at a standard rate. If no prior art is found, the patent office does not bill. The company is able to challenge any claims to prior art. Each challenge to a claim at prior art costs a certain fee.
3. Patent is awarded to the individual/corporation.
Basically the idea behind this is that companies will be charged for their stupidity. It will discourage patents on ideas that are already "out there" (patented or not). At the same time, it will *not* discourage individuals from ligitimate patents as they will be reimbursed for the "prior art search fee".
In addition, the Patent Office still gets its money and they begin providing real value.
Until something like this happens, we will all have to groan as the patent office continues to do stupid stuff and lawyers get richer.
Some of you guys should get a job reviewing patent applications. You seem to know more about prior art & novelty than these patent officers do.
Can I bum a sig?
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Interwoven Awarded Patent on Core Content Management Technology
h tml
Interwoven's Proven, Patented Technology Vital to All Internet-based Initiatives Including Enterprise Portals, eCommerce, Self-service Applications, and CRM
SUNNYVALE, Calif.-February 18, 2003-Interwoven, Inc. (Nasdaq: IWOV), a world leader in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), has been issued a U.S. Patent for its "System and Method for Website Development," the core technology within its content management product, Interwoven TeamSite software.
"When we built our flagship product TeamSite, it was in anticipation that the Internet would underpin any number of initiatives and involving thousands of employees," said Jack Jia, senior vice president and CTO for Interwoven. "The granting of this patent validates our technology leadership, reflects our history of innovation and protects our intellectual property. Our 1100 world-class customers' reliance on this technology is further proof that this is what it takes to make Internet-based applications successful."
Enterprise Initiatives Require Interwoven for Success
Content management for the enterprise requires a system and method that reflects the way organizations work - people working in parallel on multiple teams on multiple projects. Internet initiatives such as enterprise portals, eCommerce, self-service applications, and CRM all drive the need for this patented technology. The successful deployment of an enterprise portal, for example, requires the empowerment of thousands of content contributors, either working individually or as teams, to independently create, preview, and publish timely, relevant, and accurate content. Interwoven's patented technology delivers the necessary content collaboration and management framework for enterprise portals as well as all other Internet-based applications.
About the Patent
Interwoven's U.S. patent (#6505212) describes Interwoven's unique method of using branches, workareas, staging areas, and editions to develop and manage content and all revisions. This patent includes 13 claims covering among other things:
A system for asset management comprised of multiple workareas, each configured to maintain a virtual copy of content as it would appear when published;
A staging area to which content is submitted from multiple work areas and where any conflicts between content can be resolved;
Branches and sub-branches (for different projects or initiatives) that contain individual workareas, staging areas, and editions which allows for massively parallel development on a single platform;
The use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository for representing and hosting content and its structure;
Virtualization of all content regardless of location as well as Web and application servers - this allows contributors to make changes "in context" of the entire site;
The combined concepts of file history, versioning, comparison, and merging as it relates to content, provide an archive of all individual changes as well as collections of changes so they can be versioned and audited.
The award-winning Interwoven 5 platform is comprised of Interwoven TeamSite content management software, Interwoven MetaTagger content intelligence software, and Interwoven OpenDeploy content distribution software.
For more details, please see www.interwoven.com/company/features/patent/index.
About Interwoven
Interwoven, Inc. is a world-leading provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software solutions. Allied with the leading enterprise application providers, the Interwoven 5 platform provides content management for more than 1100 organizations world wide including Air France, Cisco Systems, General Electric, General Motors, and Yamaha. For more information visit www.interwoven.com.
Yeah a lot of the stuff they have in their patent is, well, obvious or common practice or whatever they call the stuff you aren't allowed to patent. But they have a completed product and filed. It will be interesting to see what they do about all the other CMS out there. I would love it if they were dumb enough to take on Vignette or any of the other commercial CMS's out there.
Many Wiki's are already doing this and have been doing this for years.
I just patented the process of "using organic photoreceptors to relay electronic signals via sheathed sodium channels to a core carbon based processing unit to elicit saturation of iron-rich fluids in nether regions of humanoid body, and further organic electrical manipulation of calcium mechanics to stimulate fluid-engorged region." I'm willing to settle for $20,000 per license violation.
I also reply below your current threshold.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
The interwoven designers were the original designers for Clearcase.
Clearcase has all of this stuff including staging and work-areas.
They are basically patenting "Clearcase as applied to the web".
Actually, come to think of it, modding the article itself could yield some interesting info...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
IMO, StarTeam's version control system is the best for web or other large scale projects for storing other than just code. They even have a dumbed down product (StarDisk) for the script writers and managers.
We have a project with over 51,000 files that is 130 gigs in size. StarTeam never had a hiccup.
Ken
We were doing this with DSE (Domain Software Engineering) system (Apollo computers). They had versioned files like VMS and this was a CVS like system. The controlled directory looked just like a normal file system but DSE would let you extract older/different versions for the file set. Then this would control the build process. (And we had to walk uphill, in the snow, both ways, in Utah !)
--jim
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This stuff doesn't matter. The only thing that matters legally in a patent is the claims, not the abstract.
May we never see th
What I would like to see is if the patent holder then goes after someone for use of the patent and the defendnat challenges the patent in court, and if the defendant is correct and the patent is invalidated- the patent office itself should be liable for court costs, plus any lost revenue due to any possible injunction during the trial.
Enough of these cases and the patent office may begin to reforem itself in when and where it grants a patent.
- Serge Wroclawski
Remember the Berman bill, where people caught violating IP rights could be attacked electronically?
Too bad we don't have a bill letting us electronically attack people caught abusing IP rights.
May we never see th
umm...AFAIK clearcase was developed by ATRIA, and the atria ppl are now working on AccuRev.
Also there are a lot of other tools - perforce, PVCS dimesions, etc that have *some* of this functionality.
Applying to only *web* objects is a slightly grey area too. What if an something not used on the web today starts being used for some web services tomorrow ?
-- Ravi
Here is a link to the actual patent.
I spent two years working on something like this. I started work on it in Feb 2000.
Crap. This is what I find fascinating - patents are supposed to protect your "years of work", and yet this has actually written off everything I've done.
When is this insanity going to end?
On the bright side, I live in europe, where it doesn't apply - I guess the Americans loose out - I won't be releasing my software to America.
Versioning as applied to the web, that's just like WikiWiki. I wonder how old that is...
The problem is that in the time between the dumb patent being granted, and the courts sorting it out, severe damage can be done to people's freedom to innovate.
Recall that over the past 100 years (and beyond), significant advances in technology have almost always been despite IP laws, not because of them*
*Some examples:
Deep in the company's website, they state, " With this patent, Interwoven joins the class of top tier software companies that recognize that market leadership is directly related to continued innovation combined with the protection of intellectual property. Patents represent the most effective and powerful way to ensure that a company protects its long-term investment in research, design and innovation."
Unfortunately, the fallacy of the first part of that self-serving statement is that history demonstrates the contrary: Innovation, especially in the area of software innovation, has been most successful in an atmosphere of sharing, openness, mutual support and peer-recognition. This is well-documented by Manuel Castells, Lawrence Lessig and others. Patents impede the advance of innovation by preventing potential competitors from innovating. With patent protection, innovation is limited to those who can afford the overhead of traaversing the patent minefield (as Stallman puts it). Those who choose to share innovation with the restriction that those who benefit also share their follow-on innovations - even when innovations pertain to other than software disciplines, accelerate the innovation process, and thereby support the development of a sustainably expanding economic infrastructure.
I do agree with the company's second statement: Patents are "most effective and powerful way to ensure that a company protects" its stuff. It just does very little for the rest of society, and for the economy in general.
Can the subject of a frivilous lawsuit sue the USPO for recklessly granting a patent when any sort of effort at prior art research would have shown the notion to be invalid? If they don't have an incentive to NOT grant patents, wouldn't this potentially give them one?
...there's too much prior art.
Oh, wait...
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
wtf? 2,363,636 bytes average per file? Are you guys checking uncompressed video frames into source control?
someone patent the same thing but add ... for b2c ... for one click shopping ... for b2b ... for (etc)
till we make it just as pointless as it should be.
It looks like what they patented is something I've been thinking of for a while.
We have a small prepublishing company, and it really would be ideal to let the authors request their changes right on the web, and then submit them. Then have a system that would send an alarm to my people, who would get on the job immediately, update the info, and then send an email ['Your work is ready'] to the authors.
But that isn't all I want. I want
(1) Secure password encoded, 128-bit at least
(2) Dating and timing of requests, backup of all previous versions
(3) Dating and timing of our new documents
(4) Access to Mac systems
And then what I'd really like:
(5) Online web-native/Postscript-native document manager that can handle templates [like equations], read postscript *FROM OTHER WORD PROCESSORS INCLUDING MS WORD*, reformat it into template-format work, do all the things that Quark XPress can do, allow mass updates with individual checks [so words and formulas must be stored in tree format].
I suppose this could be done with Acrobat files initially, including their form submission.
But the fact is, we don't have it done. Now, I'm not about to spend money to develop something that isn't mine, especially when I don't have a lot of money. But if they got a really good system going, there's an excellent chance that I would buy in, so long as the license was permanent. [I won't be held hostage, but I *will* pay money for the system].
So I really hope they do develop a halfway decent working model.
But if they don't develop it themselves, I'm not going to have a problem doing an artwork search and then developing what I wanted anyhow. Or if they have a hostage-data situation.
I won't pay money to put a noose around my neck voluntarily.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
So do you mean Wiki and all Wiki-like systems would be infringing the patent? They all have some method for diffing changes or displaying older versions.
is now patented.
r ?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/sr chnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,475,503.WKU.&OS=PN/6,4 75,503&RS=PN/6,475,503
Patent 6,475,503http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parse
Methods of using worm castings for insect repellency
Abstract
The present invention describes a material and a method for repelling insects. The method consists of disposing a naturally formed chitinase about an area to be protected. The naturally formed chitinase is produced from worm castings and the worm castings may be disposed naturally, in the form of timed-release pellets, or in a liquid form. The area to be protected includes plants and structures. The naturally formed chitinase may be disposed about the base of the plant or structure, or on the leaves of the plant.
www.wormgold.com sells the product.
According to the US patent office: "Each year the USPTO receives approximately 300,000 patent applications." (from http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/utility/utili ty.htm)
Some of these patents are no doubt software patents. And each patent application costs money to process. Even though there is apparently a fee for submitting an application I doubt the patent office is making profit. And as it is a US government funded organization the US taxpayers are paying for the process.
Investigations related to prior art surely cost a lot additinal money. If an application has already been accepted nullifying it can't be an easy process. Ultimately the whole mess must cost a grand sum... guesses anyone?
I'm rambling, but I can't help feeling that the money could be better spent somewhere else.
.: Max Romantschuk
Every patent that is filed for is posted on slashdot. If nobody says "I was doing this back in...", then they get the patent.
Trying desperately not to sound like a paranoid ninny, what is the possible reason to allow insane patent actions like this to proceed? What are possible side-effects, proceedural, legal, whatever, when the government allow idiots to patent air?
Someone must be benefiting from all this...
Too funny. Interwoven were our neighbours when I was at Beyond.com - when they filed their patent in 1999 we'd been using CVS to do everything they claim for more than a year. If they'd bothered to cross the hallway we could have shown them prior art.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of tapes
I must admire the irony of the entire situation.
I mean, imagine, unless they filled out their patent application by hand, they used at least some dozen assorted programs which made "...use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository for representing and hosting content and its structure, and the combined concepts of file history, versioning, comparison, and merging as it relates to content, provide an archive of all individual changes as well as collections of changes so they can be versioned and audited..." to get to market so that they could write their patent! =)
(-1 emote)
Based on the way the patent office works (or doesn't work) with regards to patents makes it clear that there is definitely a need for some sort of reform. The problem is what the reform should be.
We are currently seeing a rash of patents that frankly have no business being approved, but they continue to get approved because the guys at the patant office who are doing the research for prior art cannot possibly be aware of every product in the entire universe.
I suspect that probably the overworked clerks have some sort of keyword procedure that is used to allow them to check for prior art. The flaws in this approach have become painfully apparent with software patents.
For example, in this case, there seems to be not much functionality there that isn't already provided already by the likes of CVS, subversion, etc., but the clerks at the patent office have absolutely no what CVS is, or any other of the myriad obscure open source projects.
Perhaps the process should be modified such that during the "patent pending" process, non-USPO individuals/entities should be allowed to review pending patents and provide prior art. The onus would then be on the community to ensure that bogus patents don't get passed.
I'd like to see a world where private industries (as well as public organizations like FSF) would keep an eye on their respective fields of interest and perhaps bring some of this foolish crap to a stop.
This is a very good point. Is the patent application fee refunded if the patent is not granted? It shouldn't be. That would make the patent grant action more fair and discourage frivolous patents.
That actually makes sense. The USPTO doesn't do anything that makes sense.
> It seems like the USPO is pretty lenient when it comes to awarding software patents.
That's apparently true for any kind of patent, see this or this link (gathered from this excellent article by James Gleick).
I guess my patent application for "Achieving sexual stimulation in males by applying a repeated vertical up/down motion to the male reproductive organ using either the left or the right hand" has a real chance to be approved, then. Unless anyone here wants to step forward and claim prior "art" (ahem), of course.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
I had a bit of a giggle when I checked Interwoven's customer list. One of them is Financial Times, listed as being "FTyourmoney.com". If you check that site, you get redirected to news.ft.com, which is hosted on OpenMarket's (now, nearly-dead divine's) Content Server platform.
Both of these companies feature hugely expensive products few customers can afford, and seem prone to using patent bullshit to coerce badly-needed cash from the rest of the herd. Coincidentally, both companies feature prominently on fuckedcompany.com. Big surprise...
We had two products: Dynabase, and Engenda, which did *exactly* what this describes.
Hell, we even used ObjectStore (unquestionably and object repository) to store content.
Maybe RedBridge Interactive, which now owns those assets and competes with Interwoven, should sue Interwoven for unfair competition?
Beaver: "Hey Wally, getta load of this! It's another one of them swell software patents!"
Wally: "Well, you remember what the memo said, if it's got the the word 'web' in it then you should accept it, otherwise you're gonna get it when the commisioner gets back."
Beaver: "Not only does it have 'web' it's got 'web assets' and 'version control', what the heck is that?"
Wally: "No idea, but it sounds good. Hey just stamp the thing with the 'ACCEPTED' stamp and let the lawyers sort it out; we're gonna be late for beer at The Prior Art tavern."
Beaver: "Yeah, wouldn't want them lawyers to be outta work, now would we. Well, that's ten I've accepted before lunch, let's get to The Prior Art, pronto!"
The patent for the integrated circuit was hotly contested between Fairchild and Texas Instruments when Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce both invented the integrated circuit at about the same time. The battle dragged on and by the time it was resolved it was totally irrelevant since both companies were making tons of ICs.
The language and wording of patents are so removed from every-day life it's no wonder finding proof of prior art is difficult. A human can understand what the patent means, but they don't necessarily see the connection to some existing art because the language is different. The same problem applies to googling. How many hours can USPO officials commit for looking for prior art?
I've used TeamSite, and it's a fairly terrible product. Files would get locked and become unavailable for no discernible reason, never to be accessible again until the system administrator goes in and manually removes the lock.
I can think of very few situations where TeamSite is a better solution for web version control than a simple CVS repository, or even saying "hey, have you updated this file" to your coworker at the next cubicle.
Last week the SQL Server developers found out they might be liable for royalties...
Are users of this version control software next?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I propose applying to the USPO for a patent on
"A system to allow full disclosure of innovative techniques or technologies, while permitting the applicant exclusive license to said technologies for a certain period."
They're bound to grant it, and once they do, you sue them into oblivion for infringing it.
The GPL embraces the concept of intellectual property law and uses it to forward the philosophical point of view that the *code* ( not the coder) should always be free.
If the GPL rejected the concept of intellectual property it would called "public domain."
The GPL is very much *not* the same as the public domain, since it forces contractual obligations. It can only do this because the code is *someone's intellectual property.* You use the code under license. Not right.
This is why we have BSD/GPL/Aritistic license religious wars.
The power of the GPL ( whether you think it's good or bad is up to you. Please note I'm only bringing up facts here, not making value judgements) is that with no concept of intellectual property you would have *no* rights to obtain source code. The GPL uses intellectual property law to force the code "free."
KFG
While the thought of even more idiotic patents gives me the shudders... I don't have too much problem so long as it is not brought into the battlefields of litigation.
It seems that nowadays, if you make a new product you almost have to try and snap a patent right away, if only to avoid being sued by some other idiot who tries to patent a common idea.
Does there exist a section of the open source community dedicated to seeking out obvious and prior-art patents for the purpose of making those ideas public domain (thus protecting us from companies doing the same but not making them public domain)? If not, there should.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
Is anybody making an archive of all the bullshit patents?
What if you changed rule 2:
Applicant does a search (web or otherwise) on prior art, filing a paper with proof that existing systems found on the web or otherwhere are not comparable to the patent. The applicant must know of similar systems, so the work can be left for them. There's no expenses in time or efforts for USPO, and the proof can be filed with the patent.
If someone finds the proof is fraudulent, incomplete or otherwise doesn't provide negative proof of prior art, the patent can be revoked. Additionally, the patent holder could then be sued for misleading it's customers and all that sort of thing. There could also be some fines associated with patents for which proper proof was not delivered.
Any one think that there is the chance of getting the congress whores away from their masters and getting them to fix this patent problem?
I kind of doubt it, but I think it would be worth the effort to get this fixed before it be comes a lot worse. I bet it will get to the point that everyone and their dog patents everything in the whole world, patents past inventions, patents anything someone can come up with, make several zillion vague patents, and the only thing that will happen is no one will want to make anything for frear of lawsuits and extortion.
Xerox won the day as far as Infringement is concerned, however the appeal court "agreed with Palm's argument that the lower court failed to find out if Xerox's patented technology was indeed unique." and ordered that portion back to the trial court.
If Xerox looses the validity of the Graffiti patent it will set a much needed precedent and pave the way for future legal strategies in dissputes.
Attack the Patent rather than defend non Infringement.
Help fight continental drift.
(I am not AL, nor am I ANAL)
:p), submission and workflow associated with the content, embeded webserver, etc. These are features which parallel Interwoven's offerings (albeit at a smaller scale).
First off, read the actual patent, not the press release.
The patent does indeed include version control elements, but further defines exactly what their product does. See section 2, for example:
"The system of claim 1, further comprising a plurality of work areas configured to allow different users to create and maintain web content to be displayed on a website, wherein the staging area is adapted to receive web content changes of files modified in the work areas and is configured to check for conflicts in web content received from two or more work areas. "
There are very many products out there that do version control. But, there are very few that provide robust Content Management, which includes version control, but also includes a system to quickly and directly retrieve content for a web site/application and other such ammenities described in the patent. You would never do such a thing with CVS, unless you're insane.
What this does endanger is projects like Zope with it's CMS framework, which does alot of what is described in this patent. Versioning, browsable "file system" (html browsable, not unix mountable
So, having said all this, I don't see why everyone is freaking out. The patent obviously addresses a complex Content Management system, not a simple version control system. I'm sure a simple-minded judge would be able to tell the difference once given the facts.
I've used TeamSite for years.. and checked out the patent. everyone needs to settle down. Interwoven uses some clever tricks in the caching and indexing in their management system that go above and beyond what something like CVS does.
This is what they're pantenting. TeamSite was actually built on top of CVS when the project started, but the standard content manageement scheme is not what's being patented here..
Violate propriety
More patents, the more stupid and over lapping the better, grant thousands or millions untill the whole stupid system colapses under it's own weight.
ey, what if the nuke had been patented? or DNA, oh I forgot you can patent DNA. go boys, keep up the good work.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Your voice can be heard.
Phone or fax the examiner and
suggest a more thorough Non Patent Literature
search with respect to 6,505,212 issued Jan
7,2003. Suggest the use of manuals for
CVS and Rational Clearcase. Try not to sound
like an idiot and note that the examiner
can't really comment, but can be made aware
for next time.
THE EXAMINERS PHONE NUMBER IS
Jean Homere
phone 703 308 6647
fax 703 305 9731
I think I shall patent "a means of using a patent to create ownership of an obvious method of using existing devices or methods so as to stifle innovation and help lawyers buy new cars"
Actually, my patent will read:
"a means of using a patent to create ownership of an obvious method of using existing devices or methods so as to stifle innovation and help lawyers buy more cars" because sometimes lawyers want to buy classic cars too.
Let's see whose patent application makes it through the system first...if mine does, you owe me if you exercise your process!
Applying to only *web* objects is a slightly grey area too.
No it's not, I've been using CVS for web pages since about 5 minutes after my first web page, what's that, 94? When did these guys file the patent. Plus if I thought of it, and didn't think anything of it, it certainly fails the "non-obvious" test. Then again is this really news? I'd be surprised to see the headline "patent granted on a real invention in software!!!!" I mean has a really clever algorithm been invented since quicksort that wasn't just ported from mathmatics or physics? (I'm counting theoretical cs and graph theory as mathmatics, since, um it's not "practical" and so hardly ever patented.)
Rather than coding around stupid patents, people should just change the marketing language. Instead of "web assets", use different terminology like "network assets", or "message types", or "file types". Then, you can claim you're not infringing.
You are exactly right, however, by using the word "web document" everywhere, I think they've bypassed clearcase as being prior art. Although it could easily be used to manage a website.
Trying is the first step towards failure.
Everyone relies on the double-click nowadays. Why don't we get the guy that invented the mouse, and patent the double-click? Then we could sue Micorosoft for like a centillion unlicensed double-clicks.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
A couple of other (currently low-modded) posts have pointed these things out, but it would seem to me that both the Zope application server and the WebDAV HTTP extensions (incl. various implementations, i.e. Internet Explorer as a client, Zope as a DAV server) would serve as prior art...
I also worked for eBT as a Dynabase developer. Redbridge should be able to prove prior art (I believe Dynabase has been around since 1996 or so).
TODO: Insert witty sig
Schik proposed the following USPO-mess fix:
;)
;) [That is, to offer them a chance to get together with the patent applicants, in order that they might work something out, if something looks likely patentable in the end anyhow.]
"Every patent that is filed for is posted on slashdot. If nobody says "I was doing this back in...", then they get the patent."
Maybe it shouldn't be *quite* that simple, but this sounds like a great idea to me, actually, at least as a way to *block* patents. Whether silence is consent, well, I hope not
Issues of exactly what should be patentable aside, let's say that there are certain things for which patent protection is a reasonable thing. (Since I believe that to be true, despite a lot of objections to the current system.) The patent process *should* be fully open, and allow public comments from, if not Day One, at least (for instance) Day 30, so no one could spot an application, immediately duplicate it, and claim it as prior art. That is, a sort of idea escrow.
A slash-style threaded discussion would actually be a great way to let non-Patent Examiner types comment on submitted applications, and there could be a good trade in the patent-lawyer trade sifting through new applications and looking for prior art in order to notify likely prior artistes
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The people who are "true believers" will go to the extent of claiming that this goes to show how important patents are to promote innovation. They will even say, "if it wasn't for patents, we would not have the wonderful ogg-vorbis code that was designed to evade them."
:-)
You see "patents promote innovation" is not a reasoned belief about the contingent world, subject to revision as times and circumstances change. It is an absolute article of faith.
Sort of like the current Bush administration's:
The economy is doing well, hence we need a tax cut.
The economy is doing poorly, hence we need a tax cut.
Any thought-compiler would happily optimize away the implied if statement...
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
...followed by "I Love Litigation"
ClearCase is not a Content Management System. Interwoven is not a Version Control System.
ClearCase and Interwoven do indeed have a number of shared features, but noone in their right mind would *ever* use ClearCase as a CMS backend to a website. Interwoven specializes organizing information, in the form of website content, throughout it's lifecycle, including initial authoring, review stages and (this is the important part) publishing. Not a single Version Control system addresses publishing.
Interestingly for people citing CVS and the like as prior art, and that its an obvious application of CVS - they seem to be claiming that this patent covers version control of code too.
Read the text of the patent.
"As will be understood by those familiar with the art, the invention may be embodied in other specific forms without departing from the spirit or essential characteristics thereof. Website development is just one of many practical applications for the inventions disclosed herein. Other applications for the inventions disclosed herein include developing source code, media files (e.g., for CD-ROM multimedia), a media engine, and etc. Accordingly, the disclosure of the present invention is intended to be illustrative, but not limiting, of the scope of the invention, which is set forth in the following claims." (emphasis added)
Wow. That's a pretty stunning claim!
(I know this kind of 'it encompasses everything' language is in every patent, but nonetheless, my gob is well and truly smacked).
but does any know the process used to review a patent application?
The USPTO is essentially just given the task of a registry, and their review is cursory. It means little in terms of legitimacy to be granted a patent. The USPTO doesn't take responsibility for challenging patents that shouldn't have been granted but were -- it's the responsibility of private business or citizens to do so.
May we never see th
I don't claim to have all the answers, but maybe it's time to sit down, discuss the possibilities, and take action. All average citizens have to be shown is the patent for the "cat exercise system using a laser pointer" to convince them that reform is needed. The next step is a letter campaign to congress.
Perhaps some college kid with plenty of free time on his or her hands would be willing to start something? Maybe the EFF can start something?
I dunno - anyone got any useful ideas?
The GPL would be unnecessary if there were no copyright law.
If there is no "copyright", then why would you need a "copyleft"?
GPL is supposed to spit in the face of copyright law. The beauty of it is that it does this by depending upon it.
If there were no copyright, then closed source would still be inviable: because anyone could copy it around. The difference would be that the BSD, LGPL, and GPL licenses would be effectively compatible, and I could finally see goddam SVG enabled in mozilla by default, etc.
The reason the GPL does not need copyright, is that eliminating copyright would eliminate the incentive to violate the GPL. Thats a catch 22.
Looks like CVS has been around since 1998.... How can you patent the use of something that doesn't belong to you? How about we start calling our file systems folder systems? A little M$'ish, but it would negate about 90% of this patent. lol! http://www.cvshome.org/cyclic/cvs/dev-halibut.html
Jay
You're all infringing on my patent. From the USPTO site:
------------------
Claim 1:
What is claimed is
A method and apparatus of humor that operates in a recursive fashion.
Claim 2:
What is claimed is
A system comprised of the above claims, where:
Humor in the system is designed to be a witty social commentary, whereby an element of society is targeted with a hyperbolic exaggeration of a specific example of this societal element.
Claim 3:
What is claimed is
A system comprised of the above claims, where:
The societal element to be parodied is a patent, and a fictitious "patent claim" is listed such that the "patent claim" is of a system that is both deemed by the author to be obvious, and relevant to a claim being discussed or to an "inherently obvious" real-life example.
------------------
You'll all be hearing from my patent attorney for infringement. (Infringement jokes, of course, are covered by Patent 6,666,667.)
seven two six five
seven four six one seven
two six four two e
The problem is that patent office already does #2 but is handicapped by 1: the amount of patents they review. 2: their income related to how many patents they grant. 3: they only search thru their own patent databases, and certain other specific sources.
So I think #2 should be replaced by pre-emptive challenges. That is before patent is granted, it is made public, and any one, namely interested parties outside the PTO, can submit a pre-emptive challenge, for a fixed fee, based on prior art.The challenges will be allowed for a fixed period, say six months after the patent becoming public. If the prior art is upheld, the patent is not granted and that the patent holder then must reimburse the challenger with penalty (done thru the patent office to enforce reimbursement). If no valid prior art is found, the patent is granted and is dated retroactively to the date of publication of the patent by the PTO.
This way both frivolous challenges and frivolous patents will be punished. And both meritous patents and challenges will be rewarded.
Other changes, I think would help is making patents non-transferable but allow compulsive licensing if the inventor made the invention with the support of some company.
that is all for now.
All Patent Applications should be reviewed via Slashdot.
Not a single Version Control system addresses publishing.
Wouldn't publishing just be a periodic checkout by the web server from the repository?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Last May I applied for a position at the Patent Office. During the interview process, the interviewer told me that the USPTO is about 4-5 years behind in their IP patents, and that they were trying very hard to 'catch up'. Maybe they are doing the bare minimum of research in an effort to get rid of the backup. Just a thought
karma whore! mod parent down!
And dedicated, Interwoven-like content management systems were already around at least in 1996.
The answer is actually quite simple:
Patent applications should be subject to anonymous peer review by researchers in the area. People in given areas should be called to serve for peer review in a manner analogous to jury duty. It should be expected as a part of our duties in civilized society.
After being granted, all patents should also be subject to an anonymous challenge which would invoke a second jury consisting of some reviewers anonymously recommended by the challenger, some reviewers anonymously recommended by the inventor (not the assignee!), and some further reviewers chosen at random. If these reviewers do not come to a unanimous decision, then they ought to be made to meet in person at the expense of the patent assignee so they can confer and decide. If they still do not reach consensus, the patent should be officially marked controversial which should remove its presumption of validity at trial.
Attempts to corrupt or influence patent reviewers directly or indirectly should be considered as serious as attempts to influence a civil jury and any nonhuman entity that sponsors in such practices should immediately have all of its assigned patents rescinded as well as face punitive fines. Humans involved in the corruption should be subject to imprisonment.
http://www.bountyquest.com/arttutorial/arttutorial .htm
Any publicly available documentation which is physical in some form can count as prior art.
So all we have to do is start some organization (akin to dmoz), where people just enter desriptions about how things are done or could be done. (How to water a plant, how to create a sputter ion source, how to dig a hole on the moon, etc.). Every once in a while, bzip the new stuff and burn it onto CDs, and throw them on a shelf.
Voila! A publicly available website + burned CDs = the worlds best prior art repository.
It did me me an idea for $cientology picket sign designed to sow confusion:
QUIT SCIENTOLOGY
AND LOOSE YOUR MIND!
You can not sue the government, or a governmental agency, without the permision of the government. You can, however, sue an employee of a government if they are personally negligent.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Okay, yet another story about an overly broad patent on existing technology. Yes, I'm as worried about this as you are. But what can I do?
About the only thing that I can think of is to write a letter to my congressman and maybe throw a few bucks at the EFF. But I don't see that doing much because, dispite the complete idiocy of the situation, the issue just doesn't seem to have a high enough profile to attract legislative action.
Are there any other ideas about what an individual without a lot of money can really do about this problem?
Hey, man: the Beaver was smart enough to graduate from Cal so he'd probably make a pretty good patent examiner.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Either that or these guys really comment their code! :^P
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
And this you post with a Karma Bonus?
tsk, tsk
One of the main reasons we have so many ridiculous patents these days is that patent office employees get paid per patent they approve! They get no pay for quality of research, or how thoroughly they examine the patents. There is no incentive for these overworked patent researchers to actually do good work or put any thought into what they're examining. With the current pay scale, they are incented to approve as many patents as possible in the shortest amount of time. Until that changes, we'll be stuck with the joke of the patent system we currently have.
'Nuff said.
Problem: Your stock has lost 75% of it's value in one year.
Solution: File a vague and quite obvious patent. Charge royalties.
Set up a cron job that executes twice a week, and posts a "Patent system still fucked" story on Slashdot. That'll save a lot of effort.
Slashdot is part of OSDN. OSDN also owns SourceForge.net, which provides open source projects with their own CVS repositories.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"Well let me tell you a story about a man named Jed,
a poor lawyereer who barely kept his porche fed,
then one day he was sueing for some ghoul,
when he was given an patent by a fool.
IP that is, licence gold...Robbery."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
IWOV actually had to change the way they do things in order to not infringe on some of Rational's patents (for example their MVFS patent for a virtual filesystem that tracks build artifacts). I believe that the whole workspace/staging area/edition structure may have evolved from having to avoid stepping on Rational's toes.
In any case, the engineers at IWOV know that the core of TeamSite is very similar to any other version control system and that it's just optimized for web content control and delivery.
IMHO, there's nothing patentable about TeamSite. It's pretty useful and all, but not worthy of a patent.
The USPO makes very little judgement calls, getting a patent is incredibally easy. Why - because they are part of the executive branch, not the judicial branch. That way, if their is any arguement, both sides can have all their rights observed by a court of law. The question is, will a court hold it up. It does not sound like that patent will stand up.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Once article foo is authored, submitted, formally reviewed and then approved is it actually put on the production news site.
OK, then use Bugzilla, Bonsai, and the rest of Mozilla developer tools. Giving the power to check-in only to 'reviewers' (those with the power to super-review) and to 'drivers' (those with the power to approve) solves much of that.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What have you been smoking? People sue government agencies all the time. Are you on crack? Watch the news once in a while, pal.
Their site quotes the items patented as follows, with my comment of course:
- "A system for asset management comprised of multiple workareas, each configured to maintain a virtual copy of content as it would appear when published;"
This looks like Microsoft could be pissed if they go after SharePoint.
- "A staging area to which content is submitted from multiple work areas and where any conflicts between content can be resolved;"
This one pisses me off. Every big big automated shop does this in some fashion.
- "Branches and sub-branches (for different projects or initiatives) that contain individual workareas, staging areas, and editions which allows for massively parallel development on a single platform;"
Reminds me of the methods Rational has you use for Development under ClearCase
- "The use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository for representing and hosting content and its structure;"
So are they going to go after every CM product with a metadatabase that is not part of the file itself? PerForce, Clearcase, MS VSS?
- "Virtualization of all content regardless of location as well as Web and application servers - this allows contributors to make changes "in context" of the entire site;"
F5 has an appliance that does this. Clearcase has their multisite solution.
- "The combined concepts of file history, versioning, comparison, and merging as it relates to content, provide an archive of all individual changes as well as collections of changes so they can be versioned and audited"
This one has everyone being sued.
The intent is to protect how they use their metadatabase. Their wording make it look like they can just close shop and make money the old fashioned way, sue for it.
Anyone know who their Patent Attourney is?
By serving members, I assume he means senator, congressmen, presidents, and judges. In other words, people with the direct power to create and change law. I suspect the 90% is close.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. I would HOPE that 100% of federal judges are lawyers! It also seems to me that those who are best suited to create and modify laws are those who have extensive knowledge of the law and how it works (i.e. lawyers).
Lawyers are not corrupt people. There ARE corrupt lawyers, just as there are corrupt people in every profession. However, simply being a lawyer doesn't make a person corrupt or evil. It makes them well-versed in the law, and nothing more. The blanket assumption of "s/he's a lawyer and therefore can't be trusted" annoys me greatly. It's very short-sighted and ignorant.
The
I am not familiar with CVS, but the claim #1 above is pretty damn broad.
Another thing to consider is when did the patent holder file the patent? The patent may have been in prosection for a long time, thus possibly antedating prior art such as CVS.
I suspect that the USPTO used to be more lenient on software claims. But I can assure you that times have changed. I think it would be very hard to get that broad claim #1 through the examiner these days.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
That's totally incorrect. IP has nothing to do with patents.
Maybe that's a problem with your country's patent legislation.
From the patent: 1. A system for file management for files containing website content comprising: ...
The very first claim (upon which all other claims are based), indicates that it is strictly for files containing website content.
Even if this patent doesnt get shot down in future, it is not possible for them to extend their claims to affect other products (CVS,ClearCase,Perforce,MKS,PVCS,RCS,etc..) for more general revision control purposes
The filing data was Feb. 4, 1998. The first claim looks so weak as to be achievable by a large number of products by this date. Alas, I guess it must be challenged legally now that it has been issued.
If this keeps happening no patent is going to be enforcable based on the US patent office's recent history of complete incompetance. Taking every case of a bad software patent to the courts is hardly practical. I think people will soon start disregarding patents the same way they've started disregarding copyrights of music and movies.
No no no! The idea is to go against weak opponents first. They don't have the money to wage a legal war, so they rollover and pay a licence fee. You keep going after small targets. If you feel lucky, you go after a target that will fight, but can't afford a legal dream team. If you win, the next victim^w company will fold much quicker.
With the big boys, you horse-trade patent licencing. "We'll let you use our patent, if we can use yours and a first-round draft pick."
You never want to go up against a company that can spend more on legal bills out of petty cash than your total assets.
Unlike trademarks, you don't have to defend a patent against all comers or lose it. You can pick your targets carefully.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
slashdot is a sinking ship, its articles are incorrect and inflamitory 90% of the time. check out http://www.kuro5hin.org/ for a *good* technology blog.
I didn't say they couldn't try. I didn't say the government will always snub lawsuits especially when media coverage is involved.
Please, try sueing the IRS for extortion.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I may hate CVS, mostly because of the lack of good Windows clients, but even still, how in the name of all that is h0ly can they allow a patent on a filing system?
The Wrights had a patent on the airplane, mainly wing-warping to steer and level the aircraft. Tehy spent the next 15 years fighting infringement - arguing, for example that Curtiss' Ailerons infringed on the wing-warping patent.
Consequently, most aircraft development thru WW1 was in Eurpoe. While the Europeans had triplanes and multi-engine enclosed-cabin bombers, Americans were still flying the open-air flying oil derricks like the Jenny.
Hey, your not the only one. I've created two such systems. One in the late 80s early 90s, and a far far better one starting around 1998, and just recently rewriten for version 3.0.0. But as I never stand still, I'm already started my third system, which should obsolete all my prior art, and this silly patent. As I have been working in this area for almost 15 years, in addition to almost another 10 doing the same thing with dead tree documents. Don't look so shocked, version control, configuration managment, and publication, are not new functions that arose because of computors. They have been needed and used since man started collecting data into documents.
The problem space I'm solving with my third system includes, Software, Documentation, Artwork, Test Data, and System Configurations, in a distributed development enviroment that allows local developers the ability to use their favorite tools locally. I am in no fear that some lame company will patent something I am currently working on. By the time the patent is issued I'll be onto my next greatest thing.
...you said "lubricant!"
People will continue to patrent things until it reaches the point where it is impossible to do anything without violating someone elses patent. At that point it will become so difficult to avoid patent infringement that people will just start ignoring them. Patnets will become so pervasive that to prove that a person is not only violating a patent but also that taht patent they are violating is yours and not someone elses will become nearly impossible. As it is now, as long as the company you try to sue for it doesn't immediatley cave to your demands, you will be facing an uphill battle to prove they violated patents. In the end, there will be so many patents and such a mess that patents themselves will become meaningless.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I have a book, entitled Applying RCS and SCCS , published by O'Reilly, dated 1995. I'm not sure how long I've owned it, but it's collected at least two years' of dust on my shelf.
You are incorrect.
Proponents of the GPL would prefer a world in which the source code is always physically available, the coder is free to modify it without restriction and all people are free to distribute it, also without restriction.
This can *only* be accomplished through some sort of law, i.e. intellectual property.
In fact, intellectual property law in the US was specifically designed to accomplish this goal.
Without such laws source code could simply be hoarded and unavailable forever.
Where the GPL differs from most other licenses is that it doesn't *assume* commercial gain. There is nothing innately commercial about intellectual property law. The belief that there is is a fundamental misconception. The GPL merely challenges the missconception of the *commercial* basis of itellectual property, not intellectual property itself.
You have to think about this issue a little more.
KFG
Here, from the wayback machine, is a note about how I used to maintain web pages using CVS.
l e. edu/www.html
http://web.archive.org/web/19971222105157/ee.ya
The nice thing about the wayback machine is that it gives you a date for that prior art (In this case December 1997, which preceeds the Feb 1998 filing date on the provisional applicatoin.)
Not that you wouldn't want to, you couldn't.
If there was no copyright laws, the GPL would have no weight.
The claims include, 'The use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository for representing and hosting content and its structure...
:-)
This is wonderful! Now people will be forced to use relational file systems and relational modeling instead of OOP.
This "database troll" is tickled pink. Trees and OO are waaaay oversold in software engineering.
Now if we can just celibrate by some other technique than modding me "troll"
Table-ized A.I.
Zope's had real versioning since at least Principia 1.0 back in late 1997, early 1998. It may have existed in other Zope Corporation (Digital Creations at the time) products such as their classified ad system which predated Principia and contributed to the Zope technologies we love and hate.
Zope's versioning capabilities have been a built in feature of its object database, which has always been hiearachical and file-system-like. And Zope's always had "web assets" since due to its nature as a web application server that's managed primarily through a Web UI (for better or worse) I wonder where the patent and Zope collide.
Uh,
How about first providing prior art
Then requesting a re-examination
Then participating in the process
But wait a minute, the system is $%^$'d up.
Something can't be right here or I won't be justified in whining about how screwed up the PTO is.
...patenting a method of registering a claim with the US Department of Patents the rights to a mechanical or chemical device or method of performing a task.
That's my patent! I thunked it up first!
I think I shall patent my ass.
Patent...say it like, 10 times in a row...and it will start to sound weird.
PATENT
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
A lot of posters have been criticising the USPO for not scrutinizing the contents of patents passing through their system closely enough. I would suggest that having the USPO carefully examine each patent passing through its system for prior art, obviousness, etc. goes way outside the bounds of their job.
IMO, as long as the patent is properly addressed, has sufficient postage, and doesn't set off the anthrax detectors, the USPO should move it straight through the system just like the rest of the mail.
Now the USPTO, on the other hand...
"From my cold, dead hands you damn, dirty apes!" - CH
What's most likely happening here is that these companies are afraid of frivolous law suits...so instead of actually attempting to enforce their patents, they can say "but we had this patent" when someone else tries to sue...
Of course, this might be Departments/Managers/Developers trying to make it look like they have been contributing to the company's profits...the IT industry is still soft and ppl still fear for their jobs...
What seems obvious now may not have been obvious on Feb. 3, 1999 when the patent application was filed. Using what is presently known to show an invention is obvious is often "impermissible hindsight". So all of you groaning about how "obvious" these patented inventions are should think twice...
Wow, I'm in a heap o shit!!! /. says that someone has a patent on version control?
/.'e early warning alert system on our ever so oppressive patent system?
/. several times that no one could possibly have any inkling of a patent's reach without first reading the patent's file history in order to determine what was argued away during patent prosecution.
/. alarmist headlines.
Uhh boy.
Just like when they said BT had the patent on hyperlinks. Man, I did 20 years for that one.
Just like when someone else last week had the patent on the internet.
Man, SS troopers came in and took my eMachine.
Man, where would I be without
Good golly I'm going to have to shoot bamboo up my fingernails for my SourceSafe discretions.
Even though it is obvious to anyone that can read that the patent only could possibly cover web based concurrent check-ins at most.
And it is also known by any patent attorney and has been stated here on
Man, I think I would rather listen to a six year old kid scream about how his soup spilled on his green beans than see another one of these totally bullshit
I use and like Zope - the nice open-source product fairly directly competing with Interwoven's. I am afraid, the patent can hurt them seriously (and I suspect Zope implemented some ideas first...)
Sure would be nice if the utterly incompetent morons in the patent office got fired. SCCS predates this patent by over 15 years at least and there is no excuse for them not knowing that. And then there's RCS. Not that it matters, since IP law is decided on by money and lawyers vs truth. Is there a point to posting these stories anymore? Pathetic.
Sinc when is "Web COntent" NOT source code?
Because it has images? So do all gui programs, your icons, bitmaps, and images are part of the source. And they are versioned, etc. when checked into a source code control server.
No, sorry. You may call your skunk a rose, but it still stinks.
Could the patent office have experts in every field so that they do nothing incompetent in any? Wow, what a concept, competent government run by free men instead of incompetence connived at by slaves.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
- Portland Public Schools will cut out 5 off the school year to save millions of dollars they don't have
- nearly 200 inmates of the Portland city jail who are guilty of petty crimes have been released
- our unemployment rate is the highest in the nation
- gas has hit $1.80 per gallon for regular unleaded
- the Silicon Forest has been "clear-cut"
If our kids cannot be educated and honest citizens are forced to live with fewer social services then consideration should be given to disbanding the ineffective Patent Office and other non-essential Federal government services.Let corporations live without protection of intellectual property for awhile and redistribute those tax dollars to the People In Need.
Folks, whether we like it or not this is a plot to legalize software patents.
Think about it. Legalize patents and for the first ten years it will be hell because there are simply too many invalidated patents. HOWEVER, with time the patents will begin to stick since the prior art is another patent.
And during that time you just accept one patent after another. The lawyers will clean up the mess in the mean time.
In other words we are just caught in the ramp up of software patents. Remember though this is what the patent office sees and has nothing to do with what is good or bad for society....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
My favorite versioning technique is to save the piece of source that was so "Brilliant and Sweet" that I don't want to loose it, but for some reason just stopped working correctly. I usually save this as code_bugFucked.cpp and hope while I am cursing and rewriting it hope that the stupid error become obvious. Rewriting code from scratch after you understand a problem more fully can often yield better results. You can also rewrite it all only to find the problem was totally unrelated to the part you are rewriting!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Robin Gross, previously the staff attourney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has founded a new group named IPJustice. I suspect it's still getting it's feet since it's so new, but it will hopefully be able to do to IP abuses what the EFF does for online/free speech/etc issues.
Even if you want everyone to be able to use it at some point(i.e. Open Source) PATENT IT!!!
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Here's some prior art. On this project (http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings /CorInfSys/huynh/cmi.html) we ran over either a standard filesystem, or over ClearCase. CC is a really amazing versioning filesystem, allowing us to produce web content, with versioning, review/release, views, etc., with trivial ease.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I wrote some code for a company developing a web based CMS with version control (competing directly with Interwoven) from 1999 - 2001. Sadly the company died in the dot com crash and last I heard the code was being sold off -- I wonder if Interwoven bought it up before filing this patent? I know they were aware of our product, because we were at the same trade shows together.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Send an email to the interwoven contact person, mynes@interwoven.com, for this patent. Let them know how dumb you think this is and that SCCS worked with diff years ago doing everything they are suggesting via softlinks and nfs! mynes@interwoven.com
And the truly nasty thing is that the incompetence of the patent office *causes* people to feel a need to flood them with more patents, which furthers the problem. Getting your idea into their patent database seems to be the only way to ensure that they don't give someone else a patent for the same idea, since their attempts to search for prior art outside their own database are obviously failing, assuming they're even still trying at all (there doesn't seem to be evidence that they are.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I have been developing a www content server with version control and "The use of a hierarchical file system and an object repository" for over 18 months (I was conceived a lot earlier than that!) and have a product version to proove its a viable and real concept. I am based in the UK.
I assume their patent only applies in the US?
I thought in order to file for a patent you had to provide a prototype of the system?
I assume my development/product is not at risk from patents such as this, as surely I could claim prior art if they come after me.
Would patents such as this limit the future development of my product?
Surely as soon as prior art is proven, the patent is useless. Why would a company invest in such a risky/worthless patent?
Perforce has a link on their website for a paper entitled Web Content Management with Perforcefrom a conference in 1999. This is slightly later than the patent filing date, but no doubt the product info was public before then since they have been in existence since 1996.
... since this is Slashdot and all, has anyone done any searches on what some other companies (well, one in particular) has patented?
= PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-bool.ht ml&r=0&f=S&l=50&TERM1=Microsoft&FIELD1=ASNM&co1=AN D&TERM2=&FIELD2=TTL&d=ptxt
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1
Not to pick on just them (well, yeah, to pick on just them), there's a lot of prior art in some of those patents, even stuff that was granted recently you can see prior art in. Anyways, have fun and please, mod this down because it is, quite honestly, a troll...
CliffH
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
Geez, why don't the people here learn something about what they're talking about before posting?
Except for some details on the billing, what the poster described is awfully close to the current process! The current BROKEN process.
The problem is that the patent office sometimes does an incompetent search. They get paid for it too (several hundred dollars, actually).
In this case, for example, as is evident from the front page of the patent, the only thing the patent examiner ever looked at to check the patentability of this application was other issued patents and one trade press article from 1996. He/she obviously never heard of CVS, didn't know squat about versioning systems, and just rushed the thing out. The system isn't supposed to work this way, but this kind of thing keeps happening.
Also, the patent applicant is obligated to cite to the examiner everything he/she knows about that might be germane to patentability. So you have to wonder why THEY didn't cite CVS.
No, this will NEVER improve until there is more of a check on the process. But the current process is one-sided - all between the applicant and a government agency, and neither has much incentive to do a thorough search.
So, this situation is unlikely to improve until the process of obtaining a patent is a allowed to be contested procedure - contested by the people who are likely to be impacted by the patent, giving them an opportunity to see a draft of it and object before it has been issued, and to have a real no-holds-barred contested proceeding before a competent panel of experts before the sucker is approved.
No this is not a new idea. It's called "pre-grant opposition" and it's been floated out many times, and always been shot down, either by the patent lawyers or by the "small inventor" lobby. It is the way things are done in Europe, but not here.
As it is, due to a realtively recent change in the law, new patents are now "published" on the Patent Office web site well before they are allowed.
What we need is for Slashdotters to look at THOSE publications and complain about them BEFORE they issue as patents. No formal opposition procedure now exists, but people can still make noise, and it might be helpful.
In this case there was no publication, because the patent application was filed before the publication law took effect. But that will change over time. The norm will be that every new patent will have been published for the world to see, well before it issues. It would be better if there were a formal channel to DO something about it, but we should at least be reading these publications, right now, instead of merely complaining about patents that have already issued.
Must be a slow Tuesday, so let's perk things up with some software patent misinformation. If anyone takes the time to read the patent claims, they would notice that "The use ..." is not claimed. But who needs accuracy in reporting, eh?
Interwoven's press release regarding their patent states the following 6 claims (of 13 claims). I have quoted each claim as described in their press release, and then shown how CVS can be used to show prior-art over the claim.
(And it only took me half an hour and a little googling to work all this out...)
(read above blog entry for details)
Profile of the 108th Congress
A bit under half of the House and a bit over half of the Senate have law degrees. Both lower numbers than I expected, but there you go.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Slashdot is THE WORST site for patent information on the internet. This particular patent has version control as only a minor component of the patented art.
Claim 1 reads:
A system for file management for files containing website content comprising:
a work area configured to allow a user to create and maintain web content to be displayed on a website, the work area being a file system having read and write operations to enable a user to edit virtual representations of files having web content that is located in the work area; and
a staging area adapted to receive and integrate the web content submitted from the work area when the web content of the work area does not conflict with other web content submitted to the staging area and configured to retain versions of web content submitted from the work area.
I don't know what kind of wacky tabbacy Taco and his buddies are smoking, but this is a web content management system that implements a file system. Sure, it has version control, but that is only a small part of the entire package.
Come on guys, how about trying for some credibility and getting somebody who actually knows a little bit about patents to vet these articles????
Microsoft eleased a version of Source Safe that was designed to work a s an integrated versioning syste for Web sites in 1997. It is aazingly well documented.
However it is my belief that the first Web interface to a version control system was the one I wrote in 1994. I doubt that anyone wrote an earlier one since in the process of writing the system I discovered that the specification of POST was messed up completely, you closed the TCP/IP socket to indicate end of message... making it a little difficult to retrieve the result code... [Especially if you were working on the TCP/IP stacks of that day which simply did not support onesided teardown reliably or in some cases at all].
My 1994 code used the VMS Code Management System as the back end. We looked into using CVS but at the time it was a pile of not very well integrated (or for that matter debugged) scripts, there was not a robust API. I can dig out the dates etc if people really want to fight this but I can't see any cotinuations so the Microsoft prior art is going to be entirely sufficient.
BTW I did an email interface as well, slapping Web interface in front of a VMS API was hardly a challenging thing to do. The problem was trying to duplicate the work on UNIX boxes where the O/S support for resource locks was vestigial making race conditions impossible to avoid and the applications tended not to provide a clean API, everything had to be done through scripting instead.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Who cares? :P
just look at all of the existent CVS repositories which carry web application code. They existed well before the patent.
Sorry guys... this patent is a bad one and just more evidence of the failing patent system.
When someone can patent swinging sideways while elicting a tarzan yell something is very wrong!
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
what if it doesnt go up all the way, starts going down, then comes back up, but not all the way? is that 0, 1, or 2 violations?
Also, slight correction to what I said in my first post above - not ALL applications get published, because it is possible to opt out by giving up most foreign patent rights. Few applicants do this, though, with the result that most applications now are being published.
I think - that Vignette has an identical system. Vignette is arguably the best content management system out there. It demonstrates all of the features mentioned by interwoven. I'm not sure about Vignette but I think that it is "older" than interwoven.
I think this is all beside the point - since CVS used to manage a web site and deploy it is basically the same thing.
May be there are few of them, but it only takes one to create a prior art. CVS + CVSWeb "checkout" mode is a great example of a system that does exactly what you describe!
Well, then may be I am insane ;-) We run our project web site ( http://metaprl.org/ using only the CVSWeb "checkout" functionality.
Anyone remember SCCS (Source Code Control System)... Lots of versioning there... Hell, I think (but could be wrong...) that it spawned CVS...
...grumble... damn morons at the Patent OFfice...
Search the source for BSD and SYS V UNIX for SCCS headers...
I find this to be another sign that all these anouncements of "heightened levels of alert" and the security codes (blue, red, orange), or whatever they are called, are mainly there to try and scare the populace. While the country believes that we are in danger, the people have shown they will blindly follow the president. This correlates with the lack of security at Los Alamos. Even though we always hear about how dangerous it is, and how we ought to go out and buy duck tape and plastic sheeting, the most important scientific areas are barely protected. How easy would it be to enter Los Alamos, like this reporter did, and start planting bombs? Would the person be caught? I doubt it. My two cents. -Dae
"Alle reden vom wetter. Wir nicht." - SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund.
j00 4r3 3n73r1ng l337 w0r1d.
They've basically patented the Adobe Web Workgroup Server companion software to GoLive 6, which has been out for a while.
AdroidCat you are right on! We do store uncompressed video files in the repository so we can recompress them or have the source files for a re-edit. Storing binaries takes up a shitload of space.
Ha! Thought so! I'm of the school that you should be able to take a clean machine (wiped with dev tools reinstalled) get a project and build a exact copy of the project. I might be a source code contol freak, but I've tried it the other way, and it stinks. (Whoops, we lost a DLL somewhere, does anyone have it their machine, anyone...?)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Yep, I want to be able to rebuild after one of my coworkers gets run over by a bus. And it happened too! Well not exactly a bus but he is now dead just the same. Documentation and marketing materials are stored in our source control too.
regards,
Ken