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Charlie Northrup's One-Man Patent Grab Continues

Posted by timothy on from the and-now-with-only-one-eye-open dept.

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."

8 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Plain stupid by Peter_Pork · · Score: 5, Informative
    The present invention provides a virtual network, sitting "above" the physical connectivity
    We call this the Internet (late 60s). Or the telegraph (XIXth century).
    and thereby providing the administrative controls necessary to link various communication devices via an Access-Method-Independent Exchange.
    Also known as Patent-Nonsense-Is-Stealing (as old as patent system)
    In accordance with the present invention, connectivity is provided by a series of communication primitives designed to work with each of the specific communication devices in use.
    The Internet Protocol (IP) RFC 791 September 1981.
    Intraprocess, as well as Interprocess, services are available.

    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.

  2. Re:Hmm... by angle_slam · · Score: 3, Informative
    I thought there was a law though that you have to patent something within one year of public exhibition?

    There is. 35 U.S.C. 102(b):

    A person shall be entitled to a patent unless -
    (b) the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States,
  3. Re:That's okay...Circular defense. by jpetts · · Score: 3, Informative
    The whole system needs change so that people don't have to take out such defensive measures.

    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
  4. Re:Hmm... by Zeinfeld · · Score: 4, Informative
    This whole story is bogus, the patent is incredibly narrow, it is not pardigmatic and not essential to web services.

    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.

    --
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  5. Re:WTF? by kcbrown · · Score: 4, Informative
    The determination of what is novel, unobvious, and what advances the arts and sciences is legal, and not subject to what those "skilled in the art" think.

    Bzzt!!

    Title 35, Section 103(a) of the U.S. code explicitly says:

    A patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made.

    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.

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  6. Article not quite correct by AndroidCat · · Score: 3, Informative
    To knock Charlie's patents out of the box, somebody would have to have filed for a Web services-resembling patent in late 1993.

    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.)

    --
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  7. Prior Art: DARPA (was/is/was ARPA) funded research by Joe+Wagner · · Score: 3, Informative
    The SHARE, SHADE and MADE programs funded research into geographically distributed, e.g. Internet mediated, knowledge capture, design collaboration services. At the beginning of 1994 the MADEFAST experiment was initiated as a test showing that of all of the research worked. MADEFAST was "an exercise in geographically distributed design and prototyping conducted by members of the ARPA MADE research community." There is an ACM paper that was written about it. I worked on MADEFAST--it was my first paid RA'ship in grad school at Stanford. Madefast.org is no more but an archive of that website is here.

    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...

  8. Re:actually.... by angle_slam · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's called swearing back of a reference, formally known as a Rule 131 affidavit, where the inventor makes a statement that "include facts showing a completion of the invention in this country or in a NAFTA or WTO member country before the filing date of the application on which the U.S. patent issued, or before the date of the foreign patent, or before the date of the printed publication." The particular reference can not then be used as a bar against the invention. However, the filing date (which determines the expiration date of the patent) is not changed, merely the date of invention.