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."
I'm sure that he'll manage to get royalties from the two or three million geeks running Apache at home.
Maybe we'll get lucky, and he'll pull a SCO, and try to sue IBM. I'm rather certain that IBM will find something that they have prior art on, or something that his patent depends on, that IBM can pull out and have fun with...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It seems to be describing IRC, a message board, and/or basic client-server architecture, all of which provably existed before '94.
It's quite likely I'm not understanding this correctly. What, in actually legible text, has he just patented?
And what laws are there that would permit him to retroactively sue anybody who was already using something like that?
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
I've heard a lot of "off with his head!" comments around these parts in regards to Mr. Northrup, but can we look at his point of view with a shred of objectivity for a moment? Let me introduce a hypothetical situation. You, a programmer, create some wonderful technology. It's so wonderful, in fact, that it spreads all over the world and is used by nearly everyone on a daily basis. Would you not want some measure of control on this technology that you labored over for so many hours? Would you not like some shred of claim to its origin? Though it's easy to tie this man to a cross for his pursuits in I.P., I think the honest answer most of us would give is "Yes, I would." Perspective is a difficult thing to deal with; however, I think Mr. Northrup is on the "good side" in this fight.
+ Donald Gunth
+ Email: dgunth@quicktek.net
"Caffeine is the greatest lubricant ever created." -ESR
Ya know, this stuff discribed really reminds me of the old BBS days. Almost every service in this "patent" could have been applied to almost any BBS package as far back as '86, maybe even farther. Isn't that prior art? Somone need to trump this guy before he makes it impossible for anyone to run services.
Sounds like our boy Charlie read a book on communications or network theory, understood about half of it, and threw all the words he remembered into a few densely worded and confusing paragraphs.
And then he patented it.
It's kind of fun to watch Chuck's patent exploits, since he has no chance of ever winning one of his pesky lawsuits. Of course, it can be kind of annoying for the other parties involved.
While I agree with your statement, it doesn't really apply to this case.
The individual patented the 'web' before the web was even heard of outside of universities. There might be prior art but that is another argument.
The USPTO had no reason not to grant this patent as of yet. What I find annoying is that the guy sat on it for nine years but AFAIK never put forth the effort to create the web. Basically he had an idea, patented it then filed it away. Meanwhile someone else had the same idea and used it now we are all in a pickle.
Maybe we will get lucky and he will go after Unisys first.
Is to make patents NON TRANSFERABLE...
so he would have defend that stuff by himself
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.
From the article:
Claim charts??!!
rm -rf USPTO
kill -9 patent_squatter
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
Perhaps a few years too late, but IP is a network protocol that can communicate with other editions of itself independent of the underlying physical network technology (802.3, 802.4, 802.5, 802.11, ppp, fddi, atm etc.)
Of course this could be said of SDLC, HDLC, X.25, but all of these tended to specify what hardware infrastructure would be used at some point or another. Once the OSI model was created, as well as people implementing IP on various platforms, the cat was out of the bag. All of this was happening prior to 1990, so dating it at 1994, or 2003 (as appears to be the case with the article in question) means that there is sufficient prior art to eliminate the effectiveness of this pattent.
-Rusty
You never know...
As someone who once owned a rather large company, I can assure you that most of what lawyers do is take your money and protect you from other lawyers.
If you are just starting to believe that lawyers are a parasite feeding off American business, you haven't been sued yet. Wait until the profits start rolling in and they begin to smell the blood in the water.
The main reason I got out of business was I was sick of having to sit in court and spend money so a nickle and dime lawyer could try to extract money out of me - yes, it is that bad.
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 patent application. Basically, he covered one aspect of the invention in the first patent, and another aspect in this patent.
It's cheaper in the short-term to just give in to these assholes, but if everyone always fought every garbage patent, it would put them out of business.
And that would be cheaper in the long run.
Let me propose to you another hypothetical situation.
You, a programmer, create a wonderful technology. Realizing its potential, you obtain a US patent on it. But then once the patent comes through, you file it in a drawer and forget about it. You go back to your day job. In the mean time, smart and more motivated people have recreated something like what you made, and are busy taking over the world with it. After they have succeeded, you come out of your hole and say "Hey! I came up with that first! I want money!"
You would have every right to expect people to desire your slow and untimely demise for such moronic behavior.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
After my eyes crossed reading the patent (and maybe not understanding all of it) all I could think of was "gee, we did that at the University of Illinois in the late 80s." Connecting to a mainframe computer from a specialized client that used TCP/IP as a communications medium. There were directory services, local and remote executing, fees for computing royalties, directories to be searched to find applicable content.
Oh well.The world would be a different place if Universities had been into patenting cool ideas instead of just writing papers about them and then having the commercial sector use the technology.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
I feel like I am getting old when someone patents something that was already done in the good old days of yore. But I don't feel old!
1) Netbios/SMB in the mid 1980's covers most of his protocol discovery network claims (OSI).It also refutes any of his service provider claims if you think of the central fileserver as the provider of services (which I think qualifies).
2) Purchasing items was done through compuserve over dialup long before this patent. I still have my 1985 (5.25 floppies) Compuserve kit to prove so.
I didn't read the whole patent. I didn't see what, if any, physical medium was claimed (the damn double speak gives me a headache). If someone wants to give me an itemized claim, I can probably refute most the rest. There is no physical difference from a LAN/MAN/WAN from the internet. Only the protocol has changed.
Bob Metcalf should be consulted to refute more than I can.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
This had an additional advantage that the protection of your invention could be extended, since protection used to be granted untill 17 years after the issue of the patent (commonly used for submarine patents like the Lemelson heritage).
With the amendments of USC 35 (US patent law), however, this was 20 years from filing, when filed later than July 1995 (I do not know the exact date). For patents filed before July 1995 and issued after that date, the protection was 17 years after grant or 20 year after filing, whichever was longer.
HOWEVER, for this kind of stuff (continuations), filed after July 1995, the protection is 20 years after the FIRST filing. So the US will be 'freed' from this patent by December 2014.
To a certain extend, this kind of stuff is also possible with the European Patent Office (EPO), filing a divisional. However, as I have understood from US colleagues (I am a European Patent Attorney trainee), it is in the US possible to extend your subject matter and with that, the protection of your patent, pretty far from what you have filed originally. With the EPO, you would go flat on your face; the EPO is very precise with respect to addition of subject matter: strictly prohibited and the rule is applied very strict. And when the EPO makes a mistake, you just file an opposition which you will probably win.
"Would you not want some measure of control on this technology that you labored over for so many hours?"
In the computer science arena? I think not. I base this on several ideas:
1) Software algorithms are essentially expressions of mathematical formula (in a broad sense). This is inherently not patentable. Its the equivalent of copyrighting a prime number because it took you a long time to calculate that is was prime.
2) Based on 20+ years of software development, I've not seen any new algorithm. Every program is cribbed from some other program. As far as I can tell (and I'm not being facetious), nobody starts a program from a blank editor. Each program, or generation of programs, is in improvement. Allow minor improvements to an algorithm to be the basis of a family of patents is likeChevy patenting the automobile because the new Corvette goes faster than the last Corvette.
Lets look at some practical implications of patents:
1) If you consider my previous point to be true, then a small inventor can't benefit from Software patents because large corporations can always show prior art to virtually any software algorithm. You, as "Joe Inventor" don't have the resources to do this type of research so as a practical matter, software patents aren't useful to the mythical lone inventor.
2) In practice, software patents have been used exlusively by large corporations as leverage with other large corporations in arguments over control of markets.
I think the software industry was more vibrant and innovative prior to the "invention" of software patents. So if the intent of software patents has been to foster innovation, it has failed miserably at that goal and on the basis of that alone should be scrapped.
Finally to address your main point about hard work justifying a reward, consider the case of the man who makes a model of NYC entirely out of toothpicks and spends his entire life doing it. Impressive? Hell yea. Is he entitled to some sort of compensation? I don't think so. Hard work and effort is not equal to money.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you