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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.
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.
I claim this patent in the name of MARS!
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Sesame Street's Cookie Monster was unavailable for comment.
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
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.
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.
- 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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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 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