Browser Cookie Patent

resistant writes "Here's more patent madness, this time on cookies used in browsers. (By now, even Forbes has a commendable attitude about this rampant greed)." This is actually a pretty interesting article for folks not so familiar with why patents are such a big deal in this day and age.

Comments

Need to Read the Patent

[Pika]

Read the patent - F5 DID NOT PATENT COOKIES!

They patented the ability to use and set information in cookies for load balancing decisions.

Re:Need to Read the Patent

[SlashdotLemming]

Read the patent - F5 DID NOT PATENT COOKIES!

This has become a daily thing on Slashdot. Alarmist post, no-one reads the article, dozens of people complaining about the same set of high level problems.

Its evolved into an interesting business model. The ignorant masses (oh god, this has turned into an elitist post!!!) click and click and post their generic detail free complaints while those who care can still find useful information.
The marriage of paranoia and truth that other news outlets haven't mastered.

I'd complain, but a 'better' system would never stay in business.
And anyways, most of my jackass troll posts would never be accepted. ;)

Re:Need to Read the Patent

[stevens]

They patented the ability to use and set information in cookies for load balancing decisions.

And it's still shameless. I've worked with cookie persistence on F5's BigIP load balancers. It uses a cookie to identify which server out of a server pool a particular client should go to.

This is for load-balanced webservers that keep server-side session data, which is only on one server for any particular client. So the clients are distributed across the pool, but any particular client always goes to the same server in the pool. Simple.

This is what cookies were made for. Cookies were designed to solve problems where you need a particular HTTP client to keep a piece of data the server needs. This is a piece of data the F5 server needs, and so it uses a cookie to store it on the client. It's not any new innovation.

Any good developer would've come up with the same solution. This is just patenting "Using Cookies for Application X." Next we'll see "Using Cookies for Application Y." Humbug.

Re:This is not a patent on cookies

[squiggleslash]

Not in this case. Consider:

• The use of session cookies was commonplace from the mid-nineties on. IIS pretty much forced developers to send them even if they had no use for them.
• You load balance. In order for "sessions" to work, all traffic would go to a particular machine, the user being routed to it.
• You get complaints because just as someone hit the "submit" button on a form, their machine crashed, and they ended up getting billed twice for something because it turned out that the request was sent, and they, entering a second time, redid the entire request. What do you do to fix your software so that when they go in again, they end up at the same place?

The answer would be staring you in the face. The "bug" is in the session cookie, in that it's not sent to the new server the second time around and the new server can't retrieve the saved session. So you fix the cookie, make sure it contains the information about what server the session is with, and voila! The bug is fixed.

Essentially, this is patenting a bug fix. That's why it's "obvious", any programmer would have solved the issue the same way.

Incidentally, I do defend software patents from time to time as being original and easier to think of in hindsight than it was before the invention for the very same reason as you argue. I think One Click was original. I think Amazon's discussion system is original. But I don't think this one is, fixing bugs is never original, and definitely shouldn't be patentable.

'Greed' not the problem

[Ed Avis]

It's not blatant greed, it's blatant *stupidity*. People and companies will always be greedy. The point is to channel that greed so that it benefits society as a whole. Capitalism with competition is one attempt to achieve this. The patent system, also, should be designed so that when companies act in their own interest they are also benefiting the public - for example, the public gets a benefit in the long run from the invention being published rather than kept secret. But when the patent system is extended to software and particularly when the standards of patentability are so trivial, the behaviour it rewards can become detrimental to the economy as a whole, as the article suggests.

The answer is not to castigate individual companies for acting in the interest of their shareholders - even though their actions may be immoral, any one case of patent abuse will be a small part of the whole, and persuading one company to stop its actions for fear of bad PR does very little to stop other companies applying for bogus patents or to stop the patent office granting them. The answer is to fix the system.

Another reason why patent madness makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always better to apply for a patent than to have someone else apply, win the patent, and then sue you.

Applying for the patent can be a cost effective defensive move. Then you don't have to go to court and defend your position... you can choose not to enforce the patent and it cost you only the cost of the patent.

true and it's older than Reback knows.

[twitter]

Reback says that patent abuse has only been a problem for 20 years or so:

For almost two centuries, the USPTO did a reasonable job balancing the need for incentive against the need for competition. But about 20 years ago the floodgates burst open, and the free-enterprise system has been thrashing in a tidal surge of patent claims ever since.

The glass bottle making industry shows that this problem is at least 100 years old. Patents were abused so that there were only two bottle making machine companies in the entire US for decades. They used many of the techniques we see in software today. They used their patent ownership to prevent others from making machines of any kind and tried to fence each other off by applying for patents needed to improve each other's machines. They used the non competitive market to demand that all of the equipment be leased, not owned, by actual bottle makers. "Price cutters" were denied the use of equipment and concesions to make bottles were handed out like gold mines to a selected few. The price of glass bottles remained artificially high until plastic and aluminum manufacture was available as a sustitute. The US government coluded with these companies. While they were tried and convicted of anti-trust violations, no real harm ever came to them and there were no gross problems of "over production", as if that were possible. While it's true that patents on busness methods and drawing squares electronically bring new lows to the method, the ends have been achievable for a century.