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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.
And I patent it!
I read an interesting article in the New York times last week that sheds a little light on the practice of filing for these obviously ridiculous patents. Evidently companies are using these useless patents by donating them to universities or organizations and taking a huge tax write off for it. It is starting to make more sense now. $4000 (US) to "research" and file the patent, and then if they happen to get it, donate it to a college and write off the "Value" at $800,000.00! A very large profit without ever having to enforce an obviously unenforceable patent.
(sig on loan to Smithsonian)
I think Nabisco has prior art on this one.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
whoever does it, will make lot of money.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
What next? Pies, pasteries, fudge brownies? Where will this madness stop?
I'm going to patten the act of sex. I will be rich beyond all dreams. I will only collect on the act of sex at the birth of a child, but I will charge retroactivlly for all "pratice acts"
Anyone remember IEMSI? I think that was it. Anyway, it was a mechasnism that allowed BBS's and dial-up clients to exchange login information to create a session that was persistent. It was actually pretty neat. I remember I lobbied for it be included in Renegade (COTT LANG in da hizouse!). That was close to a decade ago.
Better idea: Patent spam. :)
Read the patent - F5 DID NOT PATENT COOKIES!
They patented the ability to use and set information in cookies for load balancing decisions.
Interestingly, as the technology is being used in some kind of load balancing router (if I understand the article properly, it's fairly vague) it actually looks like a hardware patent more than a software one (routers run software, but then so do milling machines...)
It still looks "obvious" to me, but it's not the patent the submitter claims it to be. Bad submitter! No cookie for you!
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I claim this patent in the name of MARS!
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Any web app developer can tell you that there's half a dozen more reliable and secure ways to persist data. Typically allowing a user to resume a session without apt verification is bound to lead to problems: data & identity theft, inappropriate disclosure...
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Sesame Street's Cookie Monster was unavailable for comment.
Patents are a critical part of the foundation of successful free markets. Why would anyone want to innovate if not to profit from his innovations?
I highly recommend The Lever of Riches to anyone who wants an accessible but rich economic analysis of innovation. The book attempts to answer the question of why different countries and civilizations have had varying levels of technological success. Patents are discussed, and in particular how different kinds of patent law influece the kind of innovation that is produced.
Amazing magic tricks
Miguel, I respect, use, and enjoy your work, but I have to think you're dead wrong here. Sooner or later, the sheer number of idiotic little patents will become overwhelming - and the coder's ability to code around them will become more and more difficult, at least if he or she wants the code to be worth a damn. I know you've had some success working around certain patents, but even you've got to admit, sooner or later, too many foolish patents will pollute the codebase into decreased functionality.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Forbes, that bastion of neoconservative thought, has rarely met a government granted monopoly they approved of (see telco deregulation, airline dereg, among others).
Everyone is just trying to get a dollar and a cent out of a tech industry they still think is hemmoraging cash. But here the implications are even worse. The worst thing about a domain name grab is that it points to a hack portal like xupiter.com and that in two years (with the anti-tech economic downturn) they'd probably drop the domain name.
By having a patent though... well, it can be bad news all around. I wonder, why didn't W3 try and pick up all these patents? Or are they out of their element here?
What is music when you despise all sound?
When this said something about someone patenting cookies I had wistfully hoped that the long drawn out legal battle that ensued would lead to an era of peace and harmony where no cookies were stored, malicious or otherwise!
Sorry, but your patent is deemed invalid as the act of stuttering is considered prior art.
Why didn't ID software patent the 1st person shooter? It would've saved humanity from loads of crappy doom-clones.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law
The company I work for was recently sued for patent infringement by some yahoo that claims that he invented hierarchal relationships in DBs. Every programmer there laughed. It was absurd since they were already in use at the time he claims to have invented it. But he WON! And the cost of an appeal could make it not worth while financially (appeals are heard in front of "experts", though).
Crazy. Things like this should never get to court!
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
You know, I don't think Keebler's and Nabisco should be forced into licensing cookie technology. There's gotta be some prior art here somewhere!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I recall a Goon Show where the word 'Help' was copyrighted by Grytpype-Thynne who made a killing by pushing Moriarty (?) into the water and charging him royalties every time he Help!
Nothing changes :-(
Here it is, FSC-0056 EMSI/IEMSI.
The USPTO measures its own net income with all the sophistication of a dot-com, focusing only on the top line--application fees.
Well, that's how every government agency works. The top line, the amount of money coming in, through fees, funding, etc., is the amount controlled by the people in charge. And in bureaucracies, that's everything -- your worth as an administrator, your salary, and your political power, is defined by how big a budget you control, and how many people you have under you. So bureaucrats do whatever they can to increase their budgets.
if someone puts a patent in my face I just laugh and code around it
Then do you think you can implement an LZW encoder by the end of May (i.e. before the U.S. patent runs out on June 21), without infringing U.S. Patent 4,558,302? What about an MP3 encoder that doesn't infringe any of these?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If someone patented popups, and enforced it, then I'll be cheering :)
Prior Art
[why cookies]
Any web app developer can tell you that there's half a dozen more reliable and secure ways to persist data.
Care to list them? Aside from making every simgle page a form, or re-writing pages to append an ID to every single URL link? Cookies are still the most convenient way to maintain a session with lower server-side overhead. Using session cookies is certainly no less secure than the above methods (possibly more so, if the browser history allows another user to continue the session due to bad coding on the server).
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
One of the main differences between patent courts and the rest of the court system is that patent court is not adversarial by design. When you go for a patent, you're not under such a heavy burden to prove you're worthy of it. And it's not the government's job to prove you're not, or even to put up a challenge. Other courts are adversarial by design. Each side does whatever it can to prove they're right and the other is wrong. Out of this emerges a winner and a loser. The patent system is not like that. Instead of a right and a wrong, we're left with two maybes, and potentially some new barriers to free commerce.
I think much of the problem would go away if the USPTO had to pay the lawyer cost for every patent they granted that didn`t hold up in court, that way even a small company would dare challenging a big one if they KNEW that they were right. Furthermore the PTO would have to be more careful in handing out patents. Just an idea ;).
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
This isn't a patent on cookies, this is a patent on load balancers detecting cookies and using them to keep a session associated with a specific server in the load ballanced pool.
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.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Actually, according to this page, the first spam message ever was by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1978. Too bad you can't patent stuff 25 years later, it would have been good PR for Compaq/HPQ/DEC to repent for spamming and patenting it ;-)
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Some people forget that computing is one industry that did not always have to deal with patents as it does now. Computing was moving along perfectly well without them, so patents don't come off as necessary to spur innovation, but weapons to needlessly hobble competitors. Patents are being awarded for ridiculous and obvious ideas that stifle the development of software and hardware for all but the richest participants. The consumer does not benefit from this reduction in competition. Furthermore, your point suggests you think that if one industry has patents they all should have them. I suggest you examine the details on how patenting works in each field and you throw out such broad sweeping conclusions.
For a far more prescient, detailed, and learned view of patents specifically talking about patenting algorithms used in the production of computer software (sometimes inaccurately called "software patents"), listen to or read RMS' talk on patents.
Digital Citizen
IIRC, Turing's Machine is describable in [relatively, for a mathematician] simple mathematical formulae. Given that all of today's computing machinery modus operandi, and therefore all software algorithms, can be described in terms of a turing machine, which in turn can be described in formulaic terms, it follows that all software is just insanely complex algebra simplified by a well-designed (for the task) notational convention.
Given that mathematical formulae cannot be patented, and that one also cannot patent simplifications by simple notation changes, all that needs to be done is hire a couple of renowned mathematicians, a bunch of lawyers with dark blue suits, and throw them at a judge.
Right? I can't possibly beleive I'm the first one to have tought of that.
-- MG
...started being able to take already existing technologies (cookies here, mouse clicking there, etc) put them together and patent the whole mess? From what I can gather the company didn't invent cookies, but a way of using cookies. It'd be like patenting driving nails in with a hammer in two hits instead of three (I can see it now, two-hit-hammering). A distinction needs to be drawn between the tool that's invented and the use of the tool.
Why patent office clerks (whose job, let's not forget, is to know enough about the technologies involved to make informed decisions) can't make this distinction is beyond me. My guess is it's not just a matter of throwing money at the problem. Remember, patents are a profitable business for the government, and somebody gets to spend that money.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
it used to be that you had to present a working model of an invention to the PTO before being granted a patent. This had the effect of both crystalizing the definition of the claims and restricting these to those specifically demonstrated w/ the implementation. Patent drawings have a similar effect though they allow for a more liberal interpretation of the implementation.
IF these hucksters had to actually show the PTO examiner the implementation of their claims alot of these patents would be either thrown out for obviousness or prior art , or forced to drastically restrict their claims.
examiner : this looks like a hyperlink ?!?
huckster : no it's a user joy eliciting interaction actuator.
examiner : wha ?
huckster : our claim is on all interactions that make people happy , or result in greater happiness.
examiner : so if I click this link and it leads to a picture of a cute baby and that makes my smile , you want to own that interaction ?
huckster : right , that baby would be infinging on our patent.
examiner : ok then here's your patent for hyperlinking to pictures of smiling babies that make me happy. Good Day
I think this rampant abuse of patents is a good thing(TM). Every time I see another of these frivolous lawsuits, I have to smile. The backlash will come eventually. Every asinine lawsuit brings us closer.
If the mainstream media is starting to get clued in, that's a pretty good sign.
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
Set up a 501c3 non-profit corp which will act as a pool of patents to be used as a counter-threat against patent racketeering. These large companies can then donate their patents to it, get a tax write-off, and they can simultaenously continue to benefit from the defensive protection of those patents.
I've been doing some patent searching myself at uspto.gov regarding clean energy sources. Evidently, the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) carries a lot of weight in the international patent arena, particularly in technical communities.
Myself, I have to wonder what is the nature of the relationship between the US and WIPO?
Anyway, HTH with your "international patent" question.
C|N>K
My hope is that, after a dozen or so of these crap patents are thrown out, companies will realize that this isn't actually an effective way to scam money. So far we've had the hyperlink thrown out, and I'm sure we'll have one-click buying, targetted ads, and cookies thrown out... so only 8 more incedents of blinding stupidity left!
Incidentally, and only slightly off-topic, I hope (Or, at least, my karma hopes), can we have less hyperlinking in stories? It shouldn't take more than one guess to figure out which link is the actual news. The "patent madness" link was unnecessary, and only served to waste precious mouseclicks.
I'm hitting submit now before I turn into a crotchety old man at 21.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Is there any page that lists patents that are now in the public domain, or have a less than a year left? That is one page I would love to visit.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The USPTO is hiring patent reviewers.
In the short amount of time you spend reading slashdot and shaking your fist at "The Man" you could have reviewed (and rejected) an obvious patent.
Seriously, It is a nice government job, with benefits, and you'd be doing a lot of good.
Actually, now the large companies are using patents defensively. Instead of saying "OK, we'll pay the $20 million" they say "OK, but we have 10 patents that you infringed on. Let's just call it even".
Well? The challenge still stands, Mr I'm-a-hot-web-developer. Tell us your secret method of keeping track of sessions that are better then cookies. Or do you have a patent on it?
Sorry, but you can't beat a cookie. All major dynamic web page schemes have easy cookie handling. ASP, PHP, Perl, etc. Most have built-in session capabilities. ASP and PHP have options for both cookie and url based sessions, and ASP will even do the autodetection for you. But URL rewriting will break when you have complex JavaScript generating URLs on the fly, or Shockwave menus, or Java applets. As long as it's the browser sending the request, the cookie is guaranteed to be sent.
You say major browsers have broken cookie support. Well, please, do tell us more, we're all waiting with baited breath. Just one example please. Personally I've never had a problem with cookies in all my years of web development. You set a cookie, you get it back on the next request. The reason people don't trust cookies, and turn them off completely, is because of a) very early security issues, and b) idiots like you spouting off bullshit.
If you're worried about cookies being hijacked, you have some very simple things you can do server side:
- Tie session to IP. If you receive a session id that does not match the IP that set it up initially, either redirect to a login page, or ignore the request.
- Time outs. If you get a session id, and last time you saw it was 30 minutes or whatever ago, time out the session and redirect to a login page.
These are just the extremely obvious ones, and I regularly use both in my web apps. There must be other methods, some more some less secure, out there.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Exaggerating the scope of a patent makes for some nice press and fans the flames of Slashdot anti-patent demagoguery, no doubt. But this patent neither claims nor reaches into the scope of cookies generally.
Rather, it is far more narrowly drawn to a particular use of cookies (acknowledged as prior art) for a particular load-balancing scheme in a particular manner.
Nah, they got Taco to edit the article!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.