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Engineer Loses SSL Patent Case against RSA and VeriSign
MeanMF writes "eWeek reports that a jury has ruled in favor of the defendants in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by an electrical engineer who clamed rights to a technology used in the SSL protocol. Not only did he lose the case, but next week the jury will rule on whether his patents are valid at all."
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Stambler filed his suit in February 2001 in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware in Wilmington. RSA and VeriSign were not the only defendants; Stambler also sued Openwave Systems Inc., First Data Corp, Omnisky Corp., and later, Certicom Corp. Omnisky later went bankrupt, and the three other companies each settled with Stambler.
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Looks like some random "genius" decided he'd make a quick buck on old technology. I'm so sick of this behavior. Anyone remember the Pocket PC fiasco? The guy claimed that MS infringed on his "Pocket PC" which was just a casino style chip that you flip to make decisions. If you don't remember you can read more at http://news.com.com/2100-1023-805115.html?legacy=c net&tag=lthd
New open source business model?
1: Write free software.
2: ?
3: Sue people for patent violations.
4: Profit!
This guy should have made sure his case was airtight before going up against
some big companies. Perhaps he was just trying to make a name for
himself and get noticed for his work.
Help pay for my wedding! Go to my kickass website
Is it a new open source businessmodel?
1: Write free software.
2: ?
3: Read article in eWeek.
4: Profit!
Meanwhile, Jeff Besoz tries to patent "patenting random stupid shit." Good luck with that one, Jeff. Thank you for bringing us innovations like "One-click shopping" and "hyperlinking" and "the internet".
I was always under the impression that patents cannot be inforced if the holder sits back and allows their technology to be used and adopted, only to decide that they want royalties years later, when people have come to rely on it.
This, I thought was illegal. Owners of patents have an obligation to tell people that they are using licensed technology, and that they have a right to charge a fee.
- PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
...until someone blames the DMCA!
Dude, where's my packet?
Did he come up with a similiar method, and then years later when another company comes out with a piece of software that does the same thing a bit differently, he goes bonkers? I think if you have one good idea, you'll probably have others. Why didn't he capitalize on this patent beforehand? Or did he try?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
He probably signed a document that says "everything that you create here, have created in the past, or will ever create belongs to the Company". It was probably in the fine print of the document he signed to get his ID badge so that he could get into the building.
I consider it duress, but what do I know?
Gary
I thought I could instruct slashdot readers on how actually the patenting process works . Good luck ;)
I'm going to patent the process of making a patent. That and the internet.
You wanna know why OGG VORBIS will never be a success? Because it just sounds plain stupid. It's embarassing to say in public.
I mean, I can talk to a friend and say "Hey man, look at this awesome MP3 player I bought."
But I could never say "Hey man, isn't this OGG VORBIS player thing just amazing?" They'd think that I'm gay!
Come up with a cool name and I'll be the first one to use it.
Am I the only one who thinks this trial has proceeded in reverse order? Surely it would have made more sense to ascertain the patent validity before worrying about whether or not it was infringed.
Perhaps patents are becoming the scare factors that derivatives used to be (and still are), where even professionals working in the field can claim in court that they don't understand what's going on and get away with it...
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
Cheers,
-- RLJ
From the article: RSA and Netscape Communications Inc., now part of Sun Microsystems Inc.
Isn't Netscape part of AOL now?
Then you thought incorrectly. Trademarks are subject to such a required defense, but patents and copyrights are not.
There is the doctrine of laches, which allow a judge to hold that a patent holder, having allowed a use of their patent to go on without notice, cannot collect damages for use of their patent prior to filing suit, but this in no way invalidates their patent nor does it prevent them from collecting damages if the same defendant should happen to infringe on their patent in the future. (Laches is basically a way of wedging the reasonable "but I didn't know it was a problem" defense into patent law)
And no, IANAL, but I do know how to use Google (TM).
Not EVER, just BELOW THIS ARTICLE. It's not like every first post clains to be the first post ever made. I wonder who got that one though.
Ohhh, ohhh, I've got this really good idea, but rather than do something with it (that involves risk!) I'll just patent it and sit around until some big company does something close enough that I can sue them.
Our legal and "intellectual property" (poverty?) system supports this - that's the news and that's the thing we should work to change.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
It wasn't a patent issue. The guy was simply claiming that MS was infringing on his trademark rights.
http://www.pdabuzz.com/News/viewnews.cgi?newsid101 0641863,9371,
or are companies who hold patents are more "equal" than the rest?
Thank you for the link, but I think you're proposing actual facts in the wrong place. The modus operandi here is "Rush quickly and post something based on the brief paragraph condescensing someone's flawed take of the story".
Thank you for playing though.
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
The big question is, when will Delaware clean up its act? Not content to merely keep quiet and maintain a not-unprofitible existence as screen door manufacturer for the world, Delaware has lately been attempting to hijack the limelight for itself in a series of staged "coincidences" which I believe are too well-planned to have been anything but a massive attempt to gain prestige amongst the other 49 states. Consider, if you will:
Engineer has "patents" which would invalidate the security of the Internet. Where does he go? Delaware.
Marvel Comics, home of Spider-Man, the X-Men, and many other lovable good guys, files for bankruptcy. Where are they forced to do it? Delaware.
The movie Fight Club. Where's it take place? Delaware.
In an episode of the Cosby Show, Vanessa's car is stolen. In Delaware.
Look, I'm a pretty average guy, not some conspiracy nut. But the evidence speaks for itself: Delaware wants to rule the world. And something must be done. Thank you.
But I just don't see why every bloody patent is seen as evil on Slashdot. I agree wholeheartedly that the patent system has gotten out of control. I just don't think every single cotton-pickin' patent is evil.
In a lot of cases, businesses need patents to exist. Hey people, they need to profit ya know. For example, what would happen if Microsoft figured out how to implement Google's page rank system (which could be done via academic papers!) and implemented it on MSN? Google would have no recourse and Microsoft has approximately 80 quntillion times the resources of Google and could easily out market them.
And by the way, you trolls... the difference between patents and RFCs is that with RFCs, there's no expectations of profit. They're made in cases where the greater societal benefit outweighs potential profits as in capitalism and other successful societal systems. Many RFCs and IEEE standards are based on corporate IP anyway, especially ones dealing with network protocols. Token Ring, FDDI, and Ethernet were all proprietary standards back in the day...
Put that in your hat. Think 2x before you dis people.
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
i Defendant Diebold, Inc. ("Diebold") moves this Court for summary judgment pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56 on the grounds of noninfringement, laches and estoppel, and failure to mark. Defendant NCR Corporation also moved for summary judgment; however, it subsequently settled with the plaintiff so is no longer a party in the action. As set forth below, we conclude that the action is barred by the doctrines of laches and estoppel.
Stambler did not invent the ATM and sure as hell did not invent SSL.
I did.
A. Non. Coward.
Wow, you're quite a dumbass, then. Turn in your nick and leave.
It made a whole new industry for lawyers! When markets become messed up(who cares about the economical diasaster that results as a side effect), the lawyers that made the problem(by making software patents), are convienently the ones there to "straighten em' out"(and load $ in their pockets)
--I haven't figured who's controlling our country, trial lawyers or energy companies
Why patents suck: http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Images/chess-flyer-crop-thum bnail.jpg
You can get sued for writing a program like the one above. It's 3 lines of code. No, really guys. It's 3 friggin' lines of code.
Look at it! It's a patent on the fucking EXCLUSIVE OR operation that's standard in every microchip ever made since the 1950s.
THAT, my friends, is why I don't trust patents. You never know how they can be extended.
PLUS they're a large gov't organization that's slow and stagnant. Let the people innovate!
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Should Mr. Stabler reimburse the companies that settled? Does anything say he has to? WIll they come after him for the money? Just a thought.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
All I can say is that I hope they get these Jury members to hear the case against Gateway for Patenting a customized user experience.
'ta
"Not only did he lose the case, but next week the jury will rule on whether his patents are valid at all."
So why don't we employ a similar method before a patent is awarded?
Think of all the frivolous lawsuits that would be prevented, as well as the absolutely absurd attempts to patent breathing, etc...
I could make some enlightened post that dazzles all who read it with its genius, but I won't. Instead I'll quote the character Dick from Shakespeare's Henry VI, part 2.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
What's up?
Looks more like evidence that the Patent office is owned by money and does not serve individual inventors. How are this man's patents any different from any other BS work protected by that office? Are they even valid? Most importantly, what makes you think he did not do anything with those patents or even needed to?
You don't need to do anything other than put a good faith effort. I could have an idea that would take billions of dollars to implement, it's still mine and the patent office would still grant me protection of that idea for being good enough to share it through them. If the only companies in the world with the kinds of resources to work that patent decided to sit for seventeen years the world is just that much worse off.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Write a program in your basement. Use your own ingenuity and craftiness. Don't copy anything anywhere that you have ever seen before.
Release it and pray someone with big pockets did not have similar ideas some time before you (or even at the same time or later); because if they patented those ideas, you owe them big money.
That is not a hypothetical future scenario. That is today.
Yes it does. Now hand over that karma before I cut you biotch.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
GIF possibly patented? Well, now we have .png, which is also a superior format.
It's not superior if nobody can view it. Among popular web browsers, only KHTML-based (Konqueror; Safari) and Gecko-based (Mozilla; Netscape) browsers can display the MNG format. The most popular web browser supports GIF animations but not PNG animations out of the box. Thus, to reach the largest audiences, web sites will still serve animated advertisement banners as GIF instead of MNG.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Be glad it's not like this:
Will I retire or break 10K?
You have to defend trademarks, not patents or copyrights. You can sit and let a patent stagnate for 10 years and then sue the balls off everyone later.
If an alleged infringer convinces a U.S. court that a patent holder has harmed competitors by delaying legal action relating to a patent, the court may impose "laches" on him. Laches would mean that he cannot collect damages for infringements that had occurred before the patent holder brought legal action. Precedent states that a delay of at least six years is presumed harmful to competitors.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So... you're arguing for dropping GIF support, right?
No, I'm asking what's the best way to deliver small animated images to a web browser without all the overhead of Flash or the patent problems of GIF.
Decompressing LZW data is apparently not covered under the LZW patent. If you remove support for reading GIF images from a web browser you develop, you'll get endless tech support calls from people who claim that "the damn intarweb's busted."
Will I retire or break 10K?
Since the result is programmedas a seried of NAND gates. OR gates are only used in bespoke circuits or SL7x chips.
So, I've NEVER used XOR.
I've only ever used a correlation of NAND gates that had a particular logical output pattern.
A very interesting (and insightful) account of the first two days of the trial can be found here
Not only did the other parties settle, they settled for huge amounts of money. First Data settled for $4 million. This, of course is on top of nearly a million dollars in other settlements from other victims, and on top of a $2.6 million settlement for Stambler's previous bogus patent. A nice way to make $7.5 million.
Tell Macrovision, who patented every way they could think of for breaking their video copy protection system just to be able to keep anyone else from using it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The sad thing is that if these patents had been held by a laywer or a big company with a good legal team, they probably would have held up at least long enough for them to generate some revenue. And chances are they would have picked their legal battles more carefully and settled out of court at just the right points to avoid even the risk of invalidation.
A transaction system is disclosed wherein, when a transaction, document or thing needs to be authenticated, information associated with one or more of the parties involved is coded together to produce a joint code. This joint code is then utilized to code information relevant to the transaction, document or record, in order to produce a variable authentication number (VAN) at the initiation of the transaction. This VAN is thereafter associated with the transaction and is recorded on the document or thing, along with the original information that was coded. During subsequent stages of the transaction, only parties capable of reconstructing the joint code will be able to uncode the VAN properly in order to re-derive the information. The joint code serves to authenticate the parties, and the comparison of the re-derived information against the information recorded on the document serves to authenticate the accuracy of that information.
Heres the link
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not an expert on encryption, but this doesn't sound like a bs patent to me. is it possible that a legitimate inventor got screwed trying to press his claim on a corportation that just doesn't want to pay people for what they've rightfully created?
But then the market tanked, as did Certicom- it is a fraction of its former size. I'm no longer there, but I'll bet this is what happened: The risk-benefit equation changed. If you lost, and if you were hit by damages (say because some cryptographers' memos called this guy an idiot and the jury was sympathetic to him), you could lose a big fraction of your revenue. If your stock is stumbling along at 0.80 dollars, you can't afford a $.20 hit in the way you can if your stock is at $5 or $20. Even if the probability of losing was just 20%, that might be too big of a risk. When management did decide to settle, I bet a couple of loonies that the remaining cryptographers were mightily pissed off, but what could they do?
I have a patent on gloating. The license fee isn't too expensive though.
Contact me offline to arrange payment.
Not if this bill passes.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Only one person can use the same plot of meat-space , or physical universe. So it is easily defensible that propriety should exist on the physical side. Actually everything in our society is absed on this concept of physical appropriation.
Now for idea this is dfar more complicated. Many person can posses the same idea, the first person to come with do not loose the idea. it isn't like a physical object, inmformation and idea can be copied at will. Now where the problem comes is that since 100,150 years to ensure developpement and research the various govt saw fit to give a small advantage to the discoverer. And one can argue that this small advantage was enough, but by lobbying and pressuring the industry wants to transform this advantage into a incredible pressure and monopolysation machine. Therein lies the problem with all the IP stuff, what people contest : It should be a balance but it ceased recently to be.
Nevertheless to comes back to your post, NO IP is not like meatspace. Truth cannot be owned for the simple reason that as soon as you spread it you share its apropriation. The only way to "protect" truth and really own it in the litteral science is either 1) abvoid saying it (protection by secrecy) 2) introduce artigfical barrier to spreading like IP law. But both are not natural for social animals like human.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Patents are supposed to be non-obvious to experts in the field. There is nothing novel or non-obvious about this one. Anybody who seriously studies encryption would have known about this technique years ago. Surely there are academic papers out there describing this, which pre-date this 1999 patent. This is very similar to storing encrypted information using a customer's password as part of the key, so the entire key does not have to be stored on the server.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
How does my post get mod'ed down to 5, but posts branching off from it get 5's. Grrrface - my creativity is getting pwnedzorized.
What the patent describes is the use of a public-key cryptosystem to sign a document. That was well-known a decade before the patent was applied for. His patent fails both on obviousness and originality.
I always make sure I let the B&N people know that their "patent behavior", relative to Amazon, is a deciding factor in my chosing to patronize them instead of their competition. Usually, it's some clerk who wouldn't know a patent if they infringed upon one who says, "that's nice", but on occasion a more senior B&N staffer has asked me to elaborate and take note of my input.
Do my lowly few hundred dollars of purchases a year make that much of a difference in B&N's policy? Not bloody likely. But, it costs me nothing to make my position clear, and there is always the slightest chance it might get others (store personel, managers, other customers) to pause and think.
You could've hired me.
Is it safe to draw a preliminary conclusion here that these patents of Stambler are really crappy?
All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs
synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to
rob a department store... with a pricing gun... She said, "Give me all
of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store."
-- Steven Wright
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