Slashdot Mirror
Charlie Northrup's One-Man Patent Grab Continues
FirstEdition writes "Will this never end! Linux Business & Technology writes that Charlie Northrup, the guy in New Jersey whose prior art on what looks to be Web services dates back to 1994 and appears to trump anybody else's IP, has gotten another patent. Of course, he has transferred the IP to a spin off company populated mostly by lawyers. More details here."
Interprocess: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) RFC 793 September 1981.
Intraprocess: main memory ENIAC 1946.
..and so on. This is plain nonsense and any competent lawyer will win the case against this atent. Not even OJ Simpson's pals can play this practical joke on a federal court.
> I'm starting to believe that we have a large parasite feeding off of (American) businesses.
I think the word you're looking for is "government".
HTH
There is. 35 U.S.C. 102(b):
I just finished reading Practical Cryptographyby Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier, and in the back there is a brief chapter about software patents. These comments are in a crypto book, but are addressed to software patents in general.
Among the choice comments are:
- Our current patent system is completely out of control. At best, patents are a necessary evil. At worst, they are an entirely legal form of fraud and blackmail.
- We think that the IT industry would be better off without patents than with patents.
- [t]he current system is simply not working.
- The patent system won't be fixed, because there is simply no political gain to be made in this aread.
All this is, as most people agree, true, but Schneier and Ferguson seem to think that it's something that we have to live with. Money talks, they say, and "There is, of course, onne group of people that consistently benefits from the patent system: the lawyers. No prizes for guessing which professional group claims that the current system is workable, or even good."Sad, but there you go.
BTW, the book is truly outstanding, and fills a huge gap in the literature of crypto: watch this space...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
He didn't really wait nine years. He filed a patent in December 1994. The patent was issued in December 1998, meaning that's how long the patent office spent examining the application. Just before the patent issued, he filed what is known as a contunuation [yale.edu] patent application. Basically, he covered one aspect of the invention in the first patent, and another aspect in this patent.
Even so there is nothing in Web Services that was not previously invented in CORBA or previous systems. I published the idea of using the Web for machine/machine interaction in 1993, I don't hink I was the first, Tim probably discussed it in 1992 at Annecy. Try to remember what we were doing there folks, controlling real time physics experiments.
The language of this patent, 'brokers' etc is all from CORBA.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Yes, the "circular transportation facilitation device" patent has been awarded to John Keogh.
Patents are becoming very difficult to validate because of the extreme number of patents and the extreme levels of knowlege to validate patents. However, this situation plays directly into the hands of the big corporations and rich lawyers squeezing out the very people that patents were set out to protect in the first place.
Large corporations love this scenario, they love to pay for patents to squeeze out the smaller players. I have yet to find a large corporation that does not play this game. Do a google search on "abuse frivolous patent" and you will find scores of well documented patent abuse cases.
The only way to fix this is to come up with another system and legislate out of the current abuse. Start screaming to your nearest congresscritter/minister.
I'm convinced now more than ever that the political systems need to be better controlled by people with a clue and a genuine interest in helping the whole and not the wealthy campaign donating individual.
Posting yet another case of patent abuse is just plain boring, doing somthing about it would pick my interest.
It sounds like something lifted off USENET.
Meanwhile, Charlie, who's got a little tiny company called Global Technologies Ltd, is productizing the IP under the code name DASCOA, short for Discovery and Connectivity Oriented Architecture, which is basically what it does using XML.
So, the IP does architecture? And that's not a "code name", it's an acronym.
The US Office of Patents and Trademarks pored over his application simply forever, comparing it to other like-minded patents.
Patents have minds? Perhaps she means applications submitted by like-minded applicants. One last then I'm done. Can you say "run on sentence"? I knew you could.
It's all about the automated discovery and connection of Web services though the word "Web" was never used in the filing since the Web didn't exist back then outside of research circles but 518 describes how to connect to a service using TCP/IP so it doesn't matter, it anticipates Web services.
Doesn't this rag have editors? I wrote a product review for Java Developer's Journal, also put out by Sys-Con Media, and the editor there came back with changes, then they shipped me a pdf proof to review. Apparently LB&T isn't so rigorous.
Bzzt!!
Title 35, Section 103(a) of the U.S. code explicitly says:
What those "skilled in the art" think is centrally important because it is they to whom the subject matter as amended by the patent is obvious or not.
If the opinion of those "skilled in the art" does not matter when even the law itself essentially says it does then the patent process is so fundamentally broken that it cannot be fixed.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
"Not to nitpick, but shouldn't we expect a little common sense from the people that we pay with our tax dollars? I mean come on, the whole "ignorance is bliss/we are overworked" excuse is really beginning to wear a little thin."
I repeat again, patent examiners are NOT paid by your tax dollars, the USPTO is one of 2 fully fee funded organizations in the government (the other is part of the FAA), so patent examiners are paid by the applicants in effect, in fact currently 500 million of the USPTO's revenue is siphoned away to pay for other agencies's budgets(about 25% of their total revenue). If this money was restored, the PTO could hire more examiners, spend more money for training, etc.
From your comments, it doesn't sound like you are an educated patent professional. If you want to read things from an examiners perspective, read the USPTO patent examiner union's website, www.popa.org. This website should really be featured on slashdot so that posters can understand the patent process from the examiner's side.
Additionally, there is a backlog of over 500,000 applications, that is there are cases filed 4 years ago which haven't even had a first examination on them and the PTO processes less than 500,000 applications a year so pendency will increase even more.
In particular, this case has a priority date of 1994, that is, any references, publicatons, etc after 1994 can't be applied. Try understanding more about the patent office, the massive number of forgein application filins and PCT (patent cooperation treaty filings which are supposed to help applications) before you post.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Mmm, no. No patent would have to be filed, just prior art proven. (Although a previous patent that this one infringes on would be a good proof of prior art.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
you can think of an invention, show it to no one, and file for a patent seveal years after you thought of it as long as you didn't tell anyone else, publish information on it, sell it etc. You will recieve a filling date based on when you filed an application, but you can file a sworn affidavit to estabish a new earlier filing date, during the patent process. it works like this
examiner produces prior art A, which was filed before applicants invention. the applicant replies with a sworn affidavit saying we made our invention before that date, the affidavit includes documentation proving that they had indeed invented before that date. the new filing date is the same date as the reference a's filing date.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
I also worked on the short documentary that was filmed during the course of the project and which was shown ultimately to a Congressional committee, IIRC.
Maybe someone somewhere will find the existence of this old research and its public publications of use...
no, no, no....
s /2 003/20030404/default.htm
IT is just an idea. IT is about ideas and realizing them, like realizing a story. IT has no reasonable limitations, etc. Hence IT should be protected by copyright, but not patents.
Patents suck and Greenspan says almost the same. Consider the following quote:
Indeed, the nature of intellectual property is importantly different from physical property. In particular, one individual's use of an idea does not make that idea unavailable to others for their own, simultaneous use. Furthermore, new ideas almost invariably build on old ideas in ways that are difficult or impossible to delineate. From an economic perspective, this provides a rationale for making the calculus, developed initially by Leibnitz and Newton, freely available, despite the fact that those insights have immeasurably increased wealth over the generations. Should we have protected their claim in the same way that we do for owners of land? Or should the law make their insights more freely available to those who would build on them, with the aim of maximizing the wealth of the society as a whole? Are all property rights inalienable, or must they conform to a reality that conditions them?
http://www.federalreserve.gov/BoardDocs/speeche
He asks questions, but he understands wealth should be a society NOT an individual. And that is why the IT industry did so well. A community proposered.... Remember the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple wanted to control, not Microsoft. Who is the more dominate player? I rest my case....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"