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."

Comments

Plain stupid

[Peter_Pork]

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.

Re:Hmm...

[Zeinfeld]

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.

Re:WTF?

[kcbrown]

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.