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: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.